One Plans Aren't Working: Why Documentation Isn't Support

One Plans exist on paper, but do they change what happens in the classroom? A teacher and parent's honest look at compliance vs real support.

Hayley Laney

9/23/20269 min read

Father and son drawing together at a table
Father and son drawing together at a table

This piece probably won't sit well with everyone, but it's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I sit on both sides of the table: as a mum with children who have disabilities, and as a teacher who has taught many children with disabilities. Teachers are getting this wrong. We document, sure, but a One Plan (Independent Education Plan or IEP), as it exists here in South Australia, is barely worth the paper it's written on, or the system it sits in. Nationally Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) reports on what accommodations and differentiation takes place in the classroom, but does not truly show what cognitive, social and emotional expense this takes on the teacher and the student. Individualisation has become creating individual goals for everyone
IEPs create real stress for teachers and parents, and they represent a small part of what actually happens in a classroom. Parents say teachers are not supporting their child. Teachers say the goals are written and documented, so progress is happening. But when you look at individual One Plans or IEP's, the context is rarely there. They rarely reflect what the goal actually is or could be, or how it translates into the classroom, and they most often put sole responsibility for action on the child.
IEPs should guide whole-class planning and give individuals the chance to reach their goals alongside their classmates, not sit as a separate, individual learning guide that applies only to that child. OnePlans sit outside the whole class planning, not as part of it and this is where we are letting students down. So what's the solution?

Compliance and what it looks like now?
Teachers are legally and morally obligated to ensure that students with disabilities are able to access education in an equitable fashion. Along with the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) and the Disability Standards for Education 2005, the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL) mandate that teachers ensure students with disabilities have equal access to education.

These obligations include:

  • making reasonable adjustments which allow students with disability to participate and learn on the same basis as students without disability

  • preventing harassment and victimisation of students with disability

  • consulting regularly with students with disability and their parents and caregivers to develop reasonable adjustments and address concerns as they arise (Australian Government Department of Education, n.d.)

There is no disagreement that students with disabilities should have equal rights to education. These broad statutory obligations are further governed and documented across multiple policy frameworks, with both state and federal obligations layered on top. In 2013, the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data was introduced (Gallagher, 2022) by the Federal Government. Under this policy, teachers became responsible for assessing and documenting the level of adjustment they provided to any student, with or without a diagnosed disability. The intention was that by assessing the level of adjustment required across a range of categories, more equitable funding could be enabled.
The difficulty with this model is that it expects teachers to diagnose the level of disability, an impact that may not even be seen within the classroom. Additionally, quality differentiated practice and evidence-based approaches that are planned and adjusted for the students actually in class don't count as providing adjustment, even when those practices provide access to everyone (Strnadová et al., 2024). Teachers spend hours assessing and categorising adjustment levels, and that data doesn't translate into different funding, different support, or different classroom conditions. This thinking about individuals within the whole plan is never captured in the documentation. It's also always a point-in-time reference, where a student may need heavy accommodation in one area, then shift to needing it in another.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme is another federally funded program that assesses the level of adjustment required to support individuals with disabilities. This program sits outside the school funding program and relies more on therapeutic goals or capital supports, but the two programs and their data collections do not communicate. Nor can funding from individual plans be used for supports in schools, which means funding doesn't work in a holistic manner. Goals are not transferred into educational practice, even though we can see a clear match between evidence-based pedagogy and evidence-based clinical therapy. This disparity between systems creates an exceptional burden for parents and carers, who are left to manage, understand, and report on systems and practices they were never given the tools to understand.
Every one of these programs, regardless of how much strengths-based language sits on top of it, operates on a deficit model underneath. NCCD requires teachers to score a level of adjustment required, which only exists as a category if there is a level of inability to measure. NDIS funding is unlocked through diagnosis and functional impairment. IEP's are built around what a child cannot yet do, then framed as goals. Strengths-based language gets added to the paperwork, but the structure underneath still starts from what the child is unable to do, not what they can.
Each state then layers its own individual plan on top of the national programs. Commonly known as IEPs, NEPs, or One Plans, these are developed alongside families to provide a personalised plan outlining the individual goals of the child. Not only are these plans arduous and administrative, they don't necessarily unlock funding to support access to those goals. This duplication of documentation contributes to over-documentation and under-implementation of goals, with proper review and individualisation of a plan rarely feasible in the context of an actual class.


 The coordination burden
With this multi-system approach to supporting students with disability, there's an expectation that communication between NCCD, NDIS, therapy providers, and schools happens seamlessly. In reality, coordinating these systems often falls to parents, along with an expectation that they understand how each system works. The parent is, without question, the expert on their child and holds valuable information for their child's educational outcomes. But the burden of knowing which system can access what support falls to parents who are not qualified experts in either education or disability.
That burden is compounded by two things rarely acknowledged in the system itself. First, teachers and educators need funded time to engage in this coordination properly, not an unpaid expectation layered on top of an already full workload. Second, allied health and education operate in genuinely different settings, and a goal that makes sense in a clinic doesn't automatically translate into something a teacher can implement in a room of thirty students. Without funded time to bridge that gap, parents are often left explaining one system to the other themselves, frequently without knowing what they're even entitled to apply for or how to question a system that isn't working for their child.
Research supports that collaboration between allied health professionals, teachers, and families improves outcomes for students, both against NDIS goals and educational goals (Jeremy et al., 2024), but this collaboration isn't accessible to everyone. The divide between students who have funding and those who don't creates an equity gap in itself. While a student may be an NDIS participant, that funding cannot be used for school-based therapy, which fragments therapy further and leaves parents developing plans for their child that never feed into each other (Iacono et al., 2022).
Another common barrier to consistent planning is communication between allied health professionals and schools. Parents are often the ones relaying information between the two, either because there's no time to connect directly or because privacy legislation itself becomes the barrier. Therapists also cannot engage with schools without payment, which widens the gap further between students who are funded and those who are not. This fragmentation of services does not allow holistic success for students.
This fragmentation doesn't stay contained to allied health and NDIS funding. It shows up in how individual goals get written and where they sit against what teachers already do. The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers already support goal planning within mainstream classroom practice, and that's where a One Plan should live: as a live document guiding whole-class planning, not a file about one child that gets checked and dated.
The evidence-based practices underneath most goals are common ones. That's where the real story sits, not in a record of how often or when an adjustment was made for a single student. Right now, the system treats each child as an isolated case to manage, a utilitarian view that strips out the communal reality of a classroom. Most of these goals are social and developmental. They don't happen in isolation, and they shouldn't be planned for in isolation either.

So what works?

There is no need to introduce new evidence-based practices on how to incorporate goals in planning and teachers have developed years of expertise in showing what works for the students in their classrooms. Teachers do not need more training on how to write a goal, or write copious individual lesson plans, they need to build in the goals to existing classroom documentation and stories to show the reality of the classroom. For this to occur we can refer back to the Australian Professional Standard for Teachers to guide our story. I'll use an old example of mine here for this purpose, because it's still relevant for today. I remember working with a year 11 student with diagnosed Autism Spectrum disorder (Standard 1). This was well before Neuro-affirming practices were a standard, and even prior to NDIS being in existence, so levels of support were not something that was seen in common education practice. This young person exhibited behaviours of rigid thinking & literal thinking, difficulty in executive function and task completion, misplaced focus, but they were an incredibly intelligent and interesting young person who could hold a conversation and articulate their learning (Standard 1). We were working on a task that was an interest based task, but required self motivation and agency (Standard 2). Recognising this would be a challenge, I developed a series of scaffolds and checkpoints, chunking tasks into manageable sections so every lesson there was an achievable task (Standard 2, Standard 3, Standard 4) These scaffolds directly linked to the goals of starting and completing certain tasks. These simple visuals were created for each of the students in my class, but were specific for this student in mind. Visuals have a strong evidence base in Occupational Therapy clinics, and support ASD students with executive function. This may be argued that this is not differentiation because I did nothing different for the other students, but the self engagement and guidance was then placed within the visual, individualising it for all. As we spoke and developed the project together we were able to put in the tasks that would be required for the project to be complete. Did they reach their goal, yes, and is this how live planning exists, absolutely. This one example of talking about my practice and how I support students with High Quality Differentiation practices, shows more than a OnePlan goal that has no real links to the tasks required. If OnePlan goals exist, we must be able to see how they work within our practice and a teaching story like this one shows it. Not a dot-point list of accommodations made everyday on the NCCD.

OnePlans as Live Documents

As hard as this is to swallow, the reality is that IEP's are not at the forefront of teacher planning and action and this must change. However, inclusive evidence-based practice is happening in every classroom, everyday. The disconnect lies not in the lack of care or skill but in a system that prioritises documentation over implementation.
To bridge this gap, we must make documentation less arduous. We need to move away from redundant, parallel documentation and tick-box compliance logs that treat individual support as an isolated administrative task. Instead, individual goals need to be embedded directly into existing whole-class programs and everyday lesson planning. By using authentic, narrative teaching stories grounded in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, we can capture how differentiation operates in real time without drowning educators in paperwork.
Ultimately, we must reframe OnePlans as live, dynamic documents evolving roadmaps that guide whole-class learning rather than static files sitting in a folder. When we embed individual needs into our everyday practice, we reduce administrative overload for teachers while delivering the genuine, inclusive support every student deserves.

Teachers don't need another template. They need documentation built into the planning they're already doing, and the time protected to do it properly. If you're mentoring early career teachers or building this into your school's practice, that's what Teaching Futures mentoring and school support is for: turning what's already happening in the classroom into a record that holds up.

References

Australian Government Department of Education. (n.d.). Information for educators: Disability Standards for Education 2005. https://www.education.gov.au/disability-standards-education-2005/educators

Gallagher, J. (2022). Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD): An institutional ethnography of student funding [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. Queensland University of Technology. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/236241/

Iacono, T., et al. (2022). Collaborative team approaches to supporting inclusion of children with disability in mainstream schools: A co-design study. Research in Developmental Disabilities. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891422222000634

Jeremy, J., Spandagou, I., & Hinitt, J. (2024). Teacher-therapist collaboration in inclusive primary schools: A scoping review. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1440-1630.12931

Strnadová, I., Danker, J., Dowse, L., & Tso, M. (2024). Supporting students with disability to improve academic, social and emotional, and self-determination and life-skills outcomes: Umbrella review of evidence-based practices. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 28(14), 3606–3622. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2023.2221239