Person-Centred Practice in ALN Wales: What It Means and How to Use It in Your Child's IDP

Person-centred practice (PCP) is not a soft philosophy tacked onto the Welsh ALN system — it is a statutory requirement embedded in the ALNET Act 2018 and the ALN Code 2021. When a school or local authority ignores it, that is not just poor practice. It is a legal failure you can act on.

What Person-Centred Practice Actually Requires

Under the ALN Code, every IDP must include a one-page profile. This profile must capture what is "important to" and "important for" the child or young person — in their own voice, in accessible language, without being filtered through what professionals think is achievable.

The distinction matters. "Important to" means what the child values, what makes their day work, what they care about. "Important for" means what adults and professionals identify as necessary for the child's safety, health, and progress. A good IDP holds both in tension — it does not flatten the child's own priorities in favour of a checklist of clinical targets.

The ALN Code goes further. It requires that:

• The child's or young person's views, wishes, and feelings are actively sought and recorded in the IDP throughout the process — not just at initial assessment but at every annual review
• If the child has limited communication, the school or LA must use accessible methods: visual supports, communication aids, drawings, audio, or video recordings
• Parents and carers have a genuine opportunity to contribute — not just to sign off on a document that has already been written

This is not aspirational guidance. The Education Tribunal for Wales requires that child views are explicitly recorded in any case statement. If they are absent, the tribunal will want a valid reason.

Why Schools Often Get This Wrong

Person-centred planning (PCP) meetings take time and skilled facilitation. In a school with one overstretched ALNCo covering 300 pupils, a genuine PCP process — where a child's priorities, communication preferences, and aspirations are meaningfully explored — is difficult to run.

What happens in practice is that schools produce IDPs where the "one-page profile" consists of a paragraph written by a teaching assistant based on general observation, with no direct quotes from the child, no documented consultation, and no evidence the child was given accessible materials in advance of the meeting. Alternatively, the meeting happens in a format the child finds overwhelming — a formal room full of adults — and the child either disengages or produces responses that reflect anxiety rather than genuine views.

The Welsh Government's own 2025 toolkit review found that some parents feel the PCP process is a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuinely collaborative planning event. Research using Davidson's wheel of participation shows that parents of children with ALN frequently feel they are being "informed" of decisions already made rather than genuinely "participating" in shaping provision.

How to Assert PCP Requirements Before the Meeting

The most effective approach is to set expectations in writing before the person-centred planning meeting takes place, rather than raising objections after an inadequate IDP has been issued.

Request the agenda and pre-meeting materials in writing. The school should be able to tell you in advance how the child's views will be gathered, what format the meeting will take, and how you as a parent can contribute. If the school cannot answer these questions, that tells you the PCP process is not being properly designed.

Submit your child's views in writing before the meeting. Prepare a brief document setting out what your child has told you matters to them about their education — where they feel safe, what makes learning hard, what kind of help they find useful. This document should be circulated to all participants before the meeting. If the final IDP does not reference this submission, you have grounds to challenge the adequacy of the person-centred process.

Document the format of the meeting. After the meeting, write a brief summary of how it was conducted and send it to the school. "I wanted to confirm my understanding of today's meeting: [child's name] attended for the first 10 minutes in a room with six adults, and their views were taken verbally. Their pre-submitted written views were not read out." This creates a record if you later challenge the IDP.

Request that the one-page profile in the IDP contains direct quotes from your child. The statutory template requires the profile to reflect the child's own voice. Paraphrased professional summaries do not satisfy this.

Using PCP Failures in a Dispute

If a school produces an IDP that fails the person-centred practice requirements, this is a ground for challenging the plan's validity — either through the LA reconsideration process or, if the LA upholds the school, at the Education Tribunal for Wales.

At tribunal, the panel will examine whether:

• The child's views, wishes, and feelings are recorded (or a valid reason given for their absence)
• The views were gathered in a genuinely accessible and non-coercive format
• The resulting IDP reflects those views rather than simply what adults decided in advance

A failure on any of these points does not automatically win your case, but it undermines the credibility of the entire IDP and strengthens your argument that the plan was not produced in accordance with the statutory requirements.

The ALN Code also requires that the IDP review process — which must happen at least annually — maintains the person-centred approach. If your child's annual review consisted of a brief meeting where you were presented with a pre-written revised IDP and asked to sign it, that is not a compliant process.

PCP for Young People Post-16

Person-centred practice becomes especially important at transition. Young people moving into Further Education Institutions (FEIs) must give their consent for the IDP to continue — the ALN Act does not extend provision to post-16 learners who do not want it. This means the young person's own views genuinely determine whether statutory support continues.

In practice, this creates a risk: young people who have experienced difficult or unhelpful ALN processes may disengage from the system entirely at 16, losing statutory protection they actually need. A genuinely person-centred transition process — one that asks what the young person wants from college, what support would actually help rather than what adults think they need — is more likely to produce an IDP that the young person actively supports.

If your child is approaching Year 9 and Year 11 transition reviews, the person-centred practice requirements mean these meetings must actively plan for the young person's post-16 aspirations, not just map which FEI they are likely to attend.

For a complete IDP audit checklist, template letters for challenging inadequate person-centred planning processes, and guidance on escalating to the Education Tribunal for Wales, the Wales ALN Dispute Playbook covers each stage in practical detail.

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