Your first Cúntas Míosúil of the year: what should it include?

The first Cúntas Míosúil of the school year falls due around now: September’s record, written up and handed over in the first days of October. If it is your first one ever, or your first under the updated guidance, the questions are usually the same. What goes in it? How long should it be? Can you work from someone else’s finished one? Here are the answers, with the quickest route to a finished record at the end.

When is it due?

The Cúntas covers a calendar month and goes to your principal once the month ends, so in most schools the September record is collected in the first week of October. The exact arrangement varies: some schools gather them on the first Friday of the month, others at a staff meeting. If you are new to a school, ask how and when yours wants them, because that is agreed at school level.

What to include, subject by subject

A monthly record that does its job covers three things for each subject:

• Work covered / Obair a rinneadh: what was actually taught this month, in plain terms. This is the heart of the document, and it is distinct from what you planned: the Cúntas looks back where your plans look forward.
• The curriculum reference: the strands, strand units or Learning Outcomes that work belongs to, taken from the right document for each subject. In 2026/27 that varies subject by subject, so a September record will cite Learning Outcomes in some subjects and 1999 strand units in others. That mix is correct and expected this year.
• A short reflection where it earns its place: what went well, what needs revisiting, what carries into October.

Your first record of the year can also name the September realities: settling-in, routines, assessments at the start of the year. That is real teaching work and it belongs in the record.

How long should it be?

Concise. The updated preparation guidance is consistent on this across all recorded preparation: records should be practical and manageable. A few plain lines per subject beat a page of rewritten plans, and a September Cúntas is often one of the shorter ones of the year. If you want the fuller picture of what principals and inspectors read it for, we wrote a complete explainer on the Cúntas Míosúil.

Can you work from a completed example?

A finished example is useful for seeing the shape of the thing: how long each entry runs, what tone the reflection takes, how the curriculum reference is written. That is exactly why our free Cúntas Míosúil template comes with one subject completed as a worked example, and a fully finished sample alongside it.

The content of your own record comes from your own classroom. It describes what your class learned in September, and you are the only person who can say what that was. The encouraging part: nearly all of it is already written, because it is sitting in your short-term plans.

Write it from the plans you taught

The Department’s guidance describes this workflow itself: where your short-term documentation has clearly outlined the learning, “it may also be used for the purpose of your Cuntas Míosúil” (Preparation for Learning, Teaching and Assessment, 2026, p18). In practice that means three moves:

1. Mark the plan. Go through September’s short-term plans and mark what was covered.
2. Record the differences. A line each for what was dropped, moved or added.
3. Add the reflection. Two or three sentences, and October’s plan starts from them.

Where Pleanáil comes in

Pleanáil builds the Cúntas Míosúil from the plans you taught. Work covered fills in per subject, the curriculum references carry across from whichever document each subject uses this year, and you add the reflection and export. The first one takes about twenty minutes; from October on it gets quicker, because the record grows alongside the plans through the month.

Download the free template to write yours by hand, or have Pleanáil generate it from your plans. Start your free 30-day trial.