SEN Support Plan software.
There is no single national support plan form. MeritDocs drafts into a best-fit structure and leaves the wording, and the judgement, to your staff.
Support plan templates differ between schools, and often between a school and the local area it works with. MeritDocs does not pretend otherwise. It drafts a structured plan from evidence the school has already recorded, maps imported plans into the closest matching sections, and puts the result in front of a member of staff before it is adopted.
What ends up in the plan is a professional decision. The software handles the drafting, the structure, the storage, the review date and the trail behind it.
What the plan holds
- Evidence, not a statement bank
- Drafting starts from what the school has recorded: assessments, staff notes and imported reports. The draft reflects that material rather than generic wording that would fit any child.
- Targets
- Structured target suggestions arrive with the draft, specific and time-bound in shape. Staff accept, rewrite or delete each one. A target that reads the same for three pupils in a year group is describing the provision, not the child.
- Provision
- The support being put in place is recorded alongside the targets it is meant to serve, with costed provision maps where a school works that way.
- Review dates
- Each plan carries its review date, and the register can be filtered by it, so a plan that has quietly become a historical document is visible rather than assumed to be current.
- Pupil and parent voice
- What the pupil says helps, and what the family has contributed, sit in the plan itself rather than in a separate file nobody opens.
- Version history
- Every document keeps its history, so a later reader can see what changed at a review, when, and who approved it.
Why we do not ship one national template
There is no single statutory SEN Support Plan form in England. Schools write to their own format, local areas often ask for something slightly different again, and a product that shipped one rigid form would be wrong in most schools on the first day.
So MeritDocs works to a best-fit structure. When an existing plan is imported from a PDF, a Word file, a scan or an image, it is mapped section by section into the closest match, and staff see what landed where before anything is adopted. Where content does not map cleanly, that is shown rather than quietly dropped.
The practical test during a trial is simple. Import a plan you already use, export the result, and hold it against the format your school and your local area expect.
What stays with school staff
The boundary matters more on this page than on any other, because a support plan is a document about a child.
- Deciding whether a pupil needs SEN support at all.
- Judging whether a suggested target is right for this child.
- Choosing the provision, and being honest about whether the school can deliver it.
- Involving the pupil and the family properly, rather than recording that you did.
- Anything an EHC needs assessment, a local authority or an external professional decides.
MeritDocs does none of that, and no software should claim to. AI assists the drafting; staff review and approve what is produced.
Questions schools and procurement teams ask
- Does it use our school's own plan template?
- It drafts into a structured best-fit format rather than reproducing a specific template. Existing plans can be imported and mapped section by section, and staff confirm the mapping before it is adopted. If your local area expects a particular format, check an export against it during the trial.
- Is a SEN Support Plan the same as an EHC plan?
- No. A SEN Support Plan is a school-level document written and maintained by the school. An EHC plan is issued and maintained by a local authority after a statutory assessment process. MeritDocs works on school-level documents and does not produce, amend or replace an EHC plan.
- Can we import the plans we already have?
- Yes. PDFs, Word files and images are read and mapped into the closest matching sections, and your SEND register can be uploaded as a spreadsheet and matched on UPN. Staff review the result, including anything that did not map, before it is adopted.
- Who can see a plan?
- Access is controlled by role and down to an individual document, so a plan can go to the whole staff or only to the people working with that pupil. Views, edits, approvals, imports and prints are recorded with the person, the time and the address, and we provide your organisation's log on request.
- What can we get out of it?
- Any document exports as Word, plain text or a print-ready PDF, whenever you want. Every document keeps its version history. If your school leaves, your data is deleted in full.
- Where is pupil data held?
- In the UK and EU. Pupil identities and document bodies are encrypted before they are stored, drafting runs in the EU under zero-retention terms, and pupil data is never used to train a model. MeritDocs is ICO registered.
- What does it cost to try?
- Every customer can start with a 28-day free trial. Pricing is one whole-school licence billed annually, from £75 per school per month, with the quote depending on phase, register size and support requirements.
Try it on a plan you already have.
Bring one real support plan and the evidence behind it into a 28-day free trial, and judge the draft against what your staff would have written themselves.
Prefer email? Write to us at contact@meritdocs.com