SEN Support Plan vs Pupil Passport: What's the Difference?

The full plan

What is an SEN Support Plan?

An SEN Support Plan is the document a school writes for a pupil receiving SEN Support, the first tier of the SEND Code of Practice's graduated response, sitting below an EHCP and not requiring statutory assessment. Schools call it different things, an Individual Learning Plan, an ILP, a DLP, sometimes still an IEP by habit, but the underlying job is the same: setting out the pupil's need, the targets, the provision in place, and a review date, all grounded in the assess-plan-do- review cycle the Code of Practice describes.

A genuinely useful SEN Support Plan has four things a weak one usually lacks: a specific, evidenced need, not just a category label, a target that's actually measurable, not a vague aspiration, provision that's costed and named, not "additional support" written without detail, and a review date that creates real accountability rather than one that quietly slides by unchecked.

The one page every teacher reads

What is a Pupil Passport?

A pupil passport is not the plan, it's the condensed, teacher-facing companion to it. Where an SEN Support Plan can run to several pages of targets, evidence, and provision detail, a pupil passport is deliberately one page, sometimes written in the pupil's own words, built around four simple questions: what I'm good at, what I find hard, what helps me, and what I'm working on right now.

The whole point of a pupil passport is that a supply teacher, a cover teacher, or a colleague meeting the pupil for the first time can read it in under two minutes and know how to actually support that child in the next lesson, not reconstruct their needs from a plan they've never seen.

How they fit together

One document, two audiences

The SEN Support Plan and the pupil passport aren't competitors, they're the same underlying information written for two different readers. The plan is written for the SENCO, the parent, and anyone reviewing provision formally, it needs the detail. The passport is written for the classroom teacher on a Tuesday morning, it needs to be fast.

The most common failure isn't writing one badly, it's letting them drift apart. A plan gets updated at a review meeting, the passport doesn't, and six months later a teacher's working from strategies that were quietly abandoned or targets that have already been met. If the passport isn't regenerated every time the plan changes, it stops being useful and starts being actively misleading.

What goes wrong

Common mistakes with both

• The passport is a shrunk-down plan, not a real summary. Copying and pasting the plan's language into a smaller font isn't a passport, it's a plan nobody has time to read either version of.
• It's written about the pupil, not with them. A passport genuinely written in a pupil's own words, even a young pupil's, lands differently with staff than one entirely authored by an adult describing a child in the third person.
• It goes stale. A passport that hasn't changed since September, while the plan behind it has been reviewed twice, is worse than no passport at all, since it actively misleads whoever trusts it.
• Twenty pages, not one. The entire value of a passport is its brevity. A three-page "passport" has already failed at the one job it exists to do.

Try it

Generate one in a few minutes

OMNIA's free One-Page Student Profile Generator builds exactly this, strengths, needs, strategies, and targets, on one page a supply teacher could read in ninety seconds. No email required.