Inclusion is now its own Ofsted grade. Your SEND plans need to show it.
The November 2025 inspection toolkit makes inclusion a standalone evaluation area for the first time — and the graduated approach (assess, plan, do, review) is what inspectors expect to see in practice. For every child with additional needs, that means an individualised support plan written by someone who knows the child, updated regularly, and evidenced against outcomes. Most SENCOs do this on top of their room leader role, in their own time, with a Word template they found online. Your SEND agent drafts individualised support plans from your observations and assessments, structures them around the graduated approach, and tracks progress against targets — so the SENCO's expertise goes into the plan, not the formatting.
What Your Agent Actually Does
Your agent drafts SEND support plans grounded in the graduated approach — so your SENCO's time goes into understanding the child, not writing the paperwork.
Drafts individualised support plans from observations
Your agent reads the child's observations, baseline assessments, and practitioner notes — then drafts a support plan with specific, measurable targets. Not generic goals like "improve communication" but plans grounded in what you've actually observed.
Structures plans around the graduated approach
Assess, plan, do, review — the cycle Ofsted expects. Your agent builds each plan around this structure, making it clear what was assessed, what was planned, what was done, and what the outcome was. Evidence of process, not just outcomes.
Tracks progress against targets over time
Each review cycle generates an updated plan that references the previous one — what improved, what didn't, and what's changing. Inspectors see a clear narrative of support, not disconnected snapshots.
Suggests strategies from evidence-based practice
Based on the child's profile, your agent suggests strategies drawn from established SEND guidance — sensory approaches, communication tools, environmental adaptations. Starting points for your SENCO to refine, not prescriptions to follow blindly.
Produces parent-friendly summaries
Parents need to understand their child's plan and contribute to it. Your agent generates a plain-English summary alongside the professional document — what the targets are, what's being done, and how parents can support at home.
The real numbers.
| SENCO time writing and reviewing plans (10–15 hrs/child/year) | £2,000–£4,500/year |
| External SEND advisory support | £500–£1,500/year |
| Admin time coordinating reviews with parents and professionals | £500–£1,000/year |
| Realistic annual cost | £3,000–£7,000 |
| Agent build (one-off, configured to your assessment framework) | £2,500–£4,000 |
| Monthly running costs (hosting + AI usage) | £80–£150/month |
| SEND Code of Practice updates | Included in first year |
| Realistic first-year total | £3,460–£5,800 |
Most nursery SENCOs are also room leaders. They fit SEND planning into lunch breaks and evenings because there's no other time. The result is plans that are either too brief to be useful or so overdue that they've lost touch with the child's current needs.
Your agent doesn't replace the SENCO's professional judgement — it replaces the hours spent formatting documents, copying observations into templates, and writing the same boilerplate for the tenth time. The SENCO stays in charge of the thinking. The agent handles the writing.
Good fit / not a fit.
This works brilliantly for:
- Settings with 5+ children receiving SEND support
- SENCOs who are also room leaders with limited planning time
- Nurseries that have received Ofsted feedback on inclusion or SEND provision
- Settings preparing for the new inclusion evaluation area
This probably isn't for you if:
- You have fewer than 2–3 children with identified additional needs
- You have a full-time, dedicated SENCO with sufficient planning time
- Your local authority SEND team provides hands-on plan-writing support
Handled like the sensitive data it is.
Children’s records — observations, safeguarding logs, SEND plans — are special category data under UK GDPR, and we treat them that way. Your agent runs on Claude via AWS Bedrock with an EU-only inference profile — meaning prompts and outputs never leave the EU, and are never used to train a model. Protected under Anthropic’s enterprise Business Associate Agreement.
Every run is logged for audit, every output is a draft your manager reviews and approves, and your data lives in a tenant isolated from every other customer. Parental consent verification is built into data workflows, and we’ll hand you a pre-filled DPIA template you can drop into your own records.
Need UK-only data residency? We offer an Azure UK South deployment as an enterprise add-on for customers with stricter procurement requirements. Full security details →
Let's talk.
We'll start with your current SEND process — how many children have support plans, what template you use, how observations feed in, and where the bottleneck usually is. Usually a 15-minute conversation.
hello@nimblecroft.com