PLP Progress Monitoring in New Brunswick: What Schools Must Track

A Personalized Learning Plan is only as useful as the data collected to measure whether it's working. Writing goals at the September planning meeting and reviewing them the following June without any intermediate tracking is not progress monitoring — it is wishful thinking.

New Brunswick's Policy 322 requires that parents receive progress reports on their child's PLP goals simultaneously with the standard report card. This is a legal obligation, not a courtesy. But the structure and quality of that reporting varies enormously between schools and between resource teachers — and parents who don't know what to expect often accept minimal reporting as standard.

What Policy 322 Requires

Under Policy 322, parents must receive reports on the student's educational progress "at regular intervals" — aligned with the standard school reporting schedule. In practice, this means a PLP progress update should accompany or closely follow each report card.

This progress update must address the specific goals documented in the PLP. A generic comment like "making good progress" is not a progress report on a measurable goal. The report should show:

• The goal as it was written in the PLP
• Where the student was when the goal was set (the baseline)
• Where the student is now (current performance data)
• Whether the goal is on track, needs adjustment, or has been achieved

If you are receiving report cards but no corresponding PLP progress reports, the school is not meeting its Policy 322 obligations. Request the progress report in writing.

What Good Progress Monitoring Looks Like

Effective progress monitoring is systematic and frequent — not just at report card time. For a goal to be useful, data should be collected regularly enough to identify whether the intervention is working before months have passed.

The most common progress monitoring approaches in NB schools include:

Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM): Short, frequent assessments of specific academic skills (reading fluency, math calculation) administered weekly or biweekly. CBM produces a data point for every assessment, creating a visual trend line over time. When the trend is flat or negative, the intervention needs to change.

Behavioral frequency counts: For behavioral goals, a staff member counts the occurrence of a specific behaviour in a set observation period. This produces data like "3 incidents per day" versus the baseline "7 incidents per day" — clear, measurable change.

Task completion rates: For goals related to executive function or organizational skills (completing assignments, using a planner), a simple percentage — "completed 4 of 5 assigned tasks without prompting" — captures progress simply.

Rating scales: For social-emotional or communication goals, standardized rating scales (administered by teachers and parents) provide structured, comparable data points over time.

A Progress Monitoring Template Structure

If your child's school is not providing structured progress reports, here is what each goal's progress report should contain:

Goal: [Write the goal exactly as it appears in the PLP]

Baseline: [The student's starting point — where they were when this goal was set]

Current Performance: [The most recent data point, with date]

Trend: [Is performance improving, stable, or declining?]

Progress toward goal: [On track / Needs adjustment / Goal achieved]

Changes to the plan: [If not on track — what changes to instruction, supports, or the goal itself are being considered?]

Next review date: [When will this be reassessed?]

What to Do When Progress Data Is Absent

A common experience: you arrive at the annual PLP review and the resource teacher says the goals "weren't quite met" but there is no data to explain why, what was tried, or whether the goals were even actively targeted.

This is not acceptable, and you can address it directly.

At the review meeting, ask:

• For each goal: what data was collected, how often, and by whom?
• Can I see the data?
• What interventions were used to work toward this goal? How often? In what setting?
• If the goal wasn't met, what changed during the year that affected progress?

If the answer to any of these questions is "we don't have that documented," that is a signal that the PLP was not being actively implemented — it existed on paper but wasn't driving instruction.

You are entitled to ask for this information. You are also entitled to make progress monitoring a condition of your PLP consent the following year.

Making Progress Monitoring a Condition of PLP Consent

When you sign the PLP at the start of the year, you can add a note — or send a follow-up email — stating that you expect to receive progress data at each reporting period and that you are requesting a brief written summary at the midpoint of each term. This is not an unusual request and most schools will accommodate it.

Frame it as a practical request: "I want to know early in the year if we need to adjust any of the goals or supports, rather than waiting until the end of the year. Can we agree to share brief progress data at each term's midpoint?"

If the school will not commit to this, document the request and the refusal. If they agree but don't follow through, raise it at the next meeting.

Using Progress Data to Advocate for Changed Supports

Progress data is not just administrative paperwork — it is your most powerful advocacy tool at review meetings. If three consecutive monitoring periods show that a goal is not being met despite the documented intervention, you have grounds to request:

• A change in the intervention strategy
• Additional specialist support (ISD referral, speech therapy, OT)
• A revised goal if the original target was set too high without adequate assessment data
• An increase in EA hours if insufficient support is documented as the cause

Conversely, if data shows a goal has been achieved, the team should document it and set a more ambitious next goal — not maintain the status quo indefinitely.

The New Brunswick IEP & Support Plan Blueprint includes a progress monitoring log template alongside the full PLP process — so you can track what's happening at home and arrive at every review meeting with your own data, not just the school's account.

See more Canada homeschool guides →