SENCO Meetings in Northern Ireland: How to Prepare and What to Push For
Most parents walk into a meeting with the school's SEN coordinator feeling underprepared and outnumbered. The school has the files, the professional language, and the institutional authority. You have a worried feeling that your child needs more than they are getting, and no clear way to prove it.
That dynamic is not inevitable. Understanding how the SENCo role works in Northern Ireland — and what the meeting is actually supposed to accomplish — changes the entire interaction.
The Role During the Transition: SENCo and LSC
Northern Ireland's SEN system is in the middle of a transition. Under the older 1998 Code of Practice, every school was required to appoint a Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo). Section 3 of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (Northern Ireland) 2016, including its statutory Learning Support Co-ordinator (LSC) provisions, has not commenced. Schools may still use the SENCo title, while the Department encourages schools to use Personal Learning Plans (PLPs) where they have received EA training or guidance.
Where a school uses either title, the role generally coordinates school-level SEN provision, maintains records, liaises with parents, and manages referrals to the Education Authority; local arrangements vary. If your school still uses "SENCo," ask who coordinates SEN provision.
Where a school uses an LSC, that person may coordinate school-level provision and liaise with external EA services. A request for Stage 2 external support or a separate statutory assessment request does not depend on the school having adopted the LSC title. The quality of the school's record-keeping — and its willingness to document honestly what it cannot deliver — can affect how strong your child's case will be if you later need to pursue a Statement.
What a SENCo/LSC Meeting Is Supposed to Accomplish
Meetings may happen as part of the school's PLP or SEN review cycle, or more frequently if there is a specific concern. The purpose is to review the child's progress against any current targets, update them where appropriate, and agree on what provision will be in place during the next period.
In practice, these meetings are where parents hear reassurances that often do not match what they observe at home. "We're seeing some improvement." "Give the intervention more time." "We'll keep monitoring."
This is the gap you need to close. A SENCo meeting is not just a welfare check — it is part of the PLP review and school SEN-record process. Every decision made at that meeting, and every piece of evidence presented, feeds into the child's documented SEN record. If that record later needs to support a request for Statutory Assessment, what was (and was not) said at LSC meetings will matter.
How to Prepare Before the Meeting
The most effective thing you can do before any SENCo or LSC meeting is to submit a written parent statement in advance. This does not need to be long — it should be a one to two page document that covers:
- Your child's current strengths and the areas where they are struggling
- Specific observations from home: reading difficulties, task avoidance, emotional dysregulation, sleep problems linked to school anxiety
- A summary of how long the current interventions have been in place and whether you have seen progress
- Any concerns that have not previously been formally logged
Send this by email before the meeting. This ensures that your concerns are formally entered into the meeting record rather than existing only as a verbal contribution that may not be minuted accurately. It also signals that you approach the process as an informed participant, not a passive recipient.
Request a copy of the current PLP before the meeting if the school uses one. PLPs are intended to be structured records, but Section 3 has not commenced, so their format and review arrangements vary. Your child's plan should contain specific, time-bound targets — not vague aspirations. If the targets say things like "will improve in literacy" without specifying what measurable improvement looks like and by when, that is a problem worth raising.
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What Questions to Ask at the Meeting
Preparation determines whether you walk away with useful information or a set of professional-sounding non-answers. These questions force specificity:
About the PLP targets:
- "Can you show me the standardized test data that was used to set these targets?"
- "What specific percentage improvement in reading age is this target aiming for, and over what timeframe?"
- "If this target is not met by the next review, what happens next?"
About the interventions:
- "Which EA advisory service delivered this input? How many sessions were there?"
- "Is this intervention delivered 1:1 or in a group? How large is the group?"
- "Do you have evidence that this intervention is effective for children with my child's specific profile?"
About external referrals:
- "Has the school made any referrals to EA specialist services for my child?"
- "Has an EA educational psychologist observed my child? If not, can you request that?"
About the threshold for Statutory Assessment:
- "At what point would the school consider requesting a Statutory Assessment from the Education Authority?"
- "What evidence would you need to see before making that request?"
The last two questions are important because they force the LSC to articulate the criteria for escalation. If they say "we're not there yet," ask them to specify in the minutes what progress would need to be made — or what further failure to progress would need to be documented — before a referral would be considered.
For the complete set of meeting preparation templates, evidence-gathering checklists, and the letter requesting a Statutory Assessment referral from the LSC, see the Northern Ireland SEN Appeals Playbook.
What to Do After the Meeting
Always follow up a SENCo or LSC meeting with an email summarizing what was discussed and what was agreed. Do this on the same day or the day after. Keep it factual and non-combative: "Following our meeting today, I understood that the school will [X], and that the next PLP review will take place by [Y]."
This serves two purposes. It creates a dated written record of what you understood was agreed, making any later discrepancy easier to identify. And it draws the LSC's attention to any inaccuracies in your summary, giving them an opportunity to correct the record in writing.
If the meeting's minutes are later distributed by the school, compare them carefully against your email summary. Discrepancies are worth flagging formally.
When the LSC Meeting Is No Longer Enough
If you have attended LSC meetings repeatedly, submitted parent statements, and have a documented trail showing that your child has not made adequate progress despite sustained, logged interventions — and the school is still not requesting a Statutory Assessment — you do not have to wait for the school's judgment.
Parents in Northern Ireland have the right to request a Statutory Assessment directly from the Education Authority, without going through the school. The EA must decide within six weeks whether to assess. If it refuses to assess and issues a refusal decision, you can appeal to SENDIST NI; the appeal must be received by the Tribunal Secretariat within two months of receiving the EA decision.
The evidence gathered through PLP reviews and LSC meetings — the standardized test scores, the intervention records, the documented gap between provision and need — is important support for your Statutory Assessment request. Good meeting practice is not just about the meeting itself. It is about building the case that forces the system to act.
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