Planning in an autism class: plans, notes and the Cúntas Míosúil

The number of special classes for autistic pupils in Irish primary schools has almost doubled since 2020. By the 2024/25 school year there were close to two thousand of them, according to the Inspectorate’s November 2025 report on the sector. That means hundreds of teachers every September taking on a job that most planning advice never describes: a class of up to six pupils, with one teacher and two SNAs, where each child may be working at a different level of the curriculum.

If you have just moved into an autism class from a mainstream one, the first discovery is that your old planning folder maps poorly onto the new job. The second is that nobody hands you a replacement. The Department’s own preparation guidance notes that generic templates “will not always capture priorities in a meaningful way”, and leaves the structure of recorded preparation to teachers and whole-school agreement. Here is the shape of what the official documents actually ask for.

The paperwork, piece by piece

An autism class teacher’s planning folder usually holds five things:

• The timetable. Built around the pupils rather than subjects. In the classes the Inspectorate rated most effective, teachers ran structured rotations where pupils worked individually, in pairs and in small groups, used visual schedules and movement breaks, and had planned time in age-appropriate mainstream classes.
• Student support files. The Inspectorate is plain on this: every pupil in a special class should have a detailed student support file, and within it a student support plan, the individualised learning plan that records the pupil’s strengths, interests and needs and sets targets based on priority learning needs. Those needs can span learning, social and communication skills, emotion and sensory regulation, behaviour and functional living skills. The plan is written by the special class teacher, with class teachers, parents, relevant professionals and the pupil involved, and reviewed regularly. (If your school used the Personal Pupil Plan, that name was retired by Circular 0032/2026.)
• Long-term planning. What the class will work on across the year. The Inspectorate’s position is that teaching and learning in special classes should be informed by the Primary Curriculum Framework, and that every pupil should have access to all seven curriculum areas in a manner tailored to their abilities and interests. In one room that can mean curriculum content from several different levels at the same time, and that is normal.
• Short-term planning, by group. The weekly or fortnightly working document: who you are working with, on what targets, through what activities. This is the layer teachers mean when they ask about “notes”.
• The Cúntas Míosúil. The monthly progress record, which the updated 2026 preparation guidance, addressed to all primary and special schools, restates as a Rule 126 expectation alongside long-term and short-term preparation. The twenty-minute Cúntas routine applies; only the organisation differs.

Worth knowing alongside all of this: Autism Good Practice Guidance for Schools (2022) is the dedicated national guidance for mediating the curriculum to autistic pupils, and the Inspectorate found the strongest schools aligned their support plans to its domains.

Plan by group, across levels

The working unit in an autism class is the group: two or three pupils with similar targets, or one pupil where the work is individual. A group plan holds the stable content, the things that change slowly:

• the target or targets the group is working toward
• the curriculum level the content is drawn from
• the strands and learning outcomes involved

Then each week you record what changes: the specific focus, the learning experiences, how you checked progress, and a short reflection. Circular 0032/2026 describes support plan targets as SMART, specific through to timebound, and the Inspectorate expects them monitored and reviewed regularly, so the natural shape of weekly planning is carry-forward: most of the plan rolls over between reviews, and you rewrite only the parts that moved. The 2026 guidance says recorded preparation should be understood as “tentative and dynamic”, evolving through annotations and amendments, and warns against spending excessive time on detailed descriptions of activities. A planning system that makes you retype the stable parts every week is taxing you for no return.

The reflection line is the one to protect. A sentence or two per group per week, written while it is fresh, becomes your Cúntas Míosúil almost by itself, and it is the running record of progress toward targets that a support plan review or a parent meeting actually draws on. The Inspectorate also found that where special class pupils spent time in mainstream classes, the learning depended on collaborative planning between the special class teacher and the mainstream teacher, and flagged schools where that planning was missing. A plan that travels well enough for a colleague to read is part of the job.

The Cúntas Míosúil in a special class

A mainstream Cúntas is organised by subject. A special class Cúntas reads better organised by group and target: the groups you worked with, the focus of the work, movement toward targets, and anything that changed shape during the month. The 2026 guidance describes the Cúntas as a record of “the learning that the children have progressed over the month” and the learning experiences that supported it, says its structure is a whole-school decision, and notes that a lengthy account of content taught is no indicator of effectiveness. If you have kept weekly reflections, the monthly record is a compile job rather than a memory test.

One caveat from the same guidance: teachers in special education roles can have specific preparation requirements set by current circulars and guidelines, so it is worth confirming your school’s agreed approach with your principal.

Keep pupil data where it belongs

One boundary keeps a special class teacher’s paperwork safe and simple: the planning layer stays at group level, and anything identifying a pupil stays in the school’s own records. Pupil names, dates of birth, diagnoses and test scores are personal data under the GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and diagnoses and assessment results are special-category data with extra protection. The school is the data controller for those records, so they belong in the systems the school already governs with that protection in place. The student support file is a school document, under the school’s control, and the Inspectorate expects enrolment reviews, parental input and professional reports to live there. Your plans and your Cúntas can describe groups, targets and work done without naming anyone. That separation protects the pupils, and it protects you.

Where Pleanáil fits

Pleanáil’s SET Planning section was built for teachers who plan by group across class levels, and an autism class is exactly that shape. You set up each group once with its targets and learning outcomes drawn from the curriculum at the right level. Each week you record the focus, experiences and a reflection, and “start from last week” carries the plan forward so you only change what moved. The weekly reflections compile into a Cúntas Míosúil for the month, per group.

The pupil-data boundary above is built in: Pleanáil stores no pupil names or personal details, so support files and records stay with the school, where they belong.

Want the paper version first? Download the free SET group planning template (PDF): a group profile and weekly plan, with no pupil data anywhere on the page.

Try Pleanáil free for 30 days, for solo teachers and whole schools.

Frequently asked questions

Do special class teachers keep a Cúntas Míosúil? Yes. The 2026 preparation guidance applies to all primary and special schools and restates the Rule 126 expectations: long-term preparation, short-term preparation (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) and monthly progress records. Organising it by group and target rather than by subject makes it a truer record of the work, and the structure is a whole-school decision.

Which curriculum do I plan from? The primary curriculum. The Inspectorate’s guidance is that teaching in special classes for autistic pupils should be informed by the Primary Curriculum Framework, with access to all seven curriculum areas tailored to each pupil’s abilities, strengths and interests. One class drawing on several levels at once is the normal case, and the plan should say which level each group’s content comes from.

What about IEPs and Personal Pupil Plans? The current official documents use two terms: the student support file, the school-held file tracking a pupil’s pathway, and the student support plan inside it, written by the special class teacher. Circular 0032/2026 retired the Personal Pupil Plan and folded care needs into the student support plan. Whatever your school called these documents before, they are school records, held and controlled by the school, and your group planning should reference their targets without duplicating their contents.