How to write your long-term plans for September: a working method

There are two ways to write long-term plans in August. One is to open last year’s folder, change the dates, and hope nobody looks too closely. The other is to lose a full week of your holidays to documents nobody will read twice. Neither is what long-term planning is for, and neither is what the updated guidance asks of you.

Here is a method that produces LTPs you will actually use, in a couple of focused sessions.

Want a template to start from? Download the free long-term plan template (PDF), a year-at-a-glance, month-by-month layout with September filled in as a worked example. Print it and map your year by hand, or in Pleanáil the Learning Outcomes for your class load automatically, so you place them across the months.

First, know what an LTP is for

The 2026 Preparation for Learning, Teaching and Assessment guidance is clear about the job of a long-term plan: it maps what your class will learn across the year or term, it reflects your school’s curriculum decisions, and it gives your short-term preparation something to hang off. That is the whole job; anything reading like a restated curriculum or a day-by-day script has overshot it.

The test for every section you write: will this help me in November? If a paragraph will never be read again after September, it does not belong in the plan.

Step 1: start from the right curriculum for each subject

For 2026/27, your subjects sit on different curricula: the Primary Language Curriculum for English and Gaeilge, the 2023 Primary Mathematics Curriculum for Maths, the new 2025 specification for your school’s chosen enactment area, and the 1999 curriculum for the rest. We wrote a full subject-by-subject guide to this here.

Getting this right at the start matters more than anything else in the folder, because every objective and outcome you select flows from it.

Step 2: check the whole-school plan before you write a word

If your school has agreed sequencing, novels, schemes, or approaches for a subject, your LTP should reflect them rather than repeat them. A line that says “as per school plan, Term 1: place value and addition” does more work than a page of restated content. If your school has no agreed position for a subject, that is useful to know too: it means the decision is genuinely yours.

Step 3: map months, not paragraphs

The strongest LTP structure for most subjects is a month-by-month map: which strands, strand units and learning outcomes or objectives land in which month. It is quick to write, quick to scan, and it makes your Cuntas Míosúil at the end of each month almost automatic, because the plan and the reflection share the same unit of time.

Resist the urge to write learning experiences in detail at this level. That is short-term planning’s job. The LTP says what and when; the fortnightly or monthly plan says how.

Step 4: select fewer objectives than feels safe

The most common LTP mistake is over-selection: sweeping every objective into the plan so nothing is missed. All that guarantees is a coverage report you cannot stand over. Choose the objectives you genuinely intend to teach, and let revision and integration pick up the rest. A shorter plan is stronger in front of any principal or inspector than a long aspirational one, because it matches what actually happens in your room.

Step 5: write the recurring sections once, properly

Aims, methodologies, differentiation, assessment approaches: these barely change between subjects taught by the same teacher in the same room. Write them once, well, in your own voice, and adapt per subject where it genuinely differs. Nobody benefits from ten subtly different paragraphs about active learning.

What this looks like in practice

Two sessions. In the first, confirm the curriculum version per subject, read the whole-school plan, and rough out the month map for your core subjects. In the second, finish the month maps, write the recurring sections, and read the whole thing back asking the November question. Done well, that is an afternoon each.

Pleanáil compresses most of this further: it gives you the right curriculum for every subject and class level automatically, lets you build LTPs month by month against the real strands and outcomes, and carries your selections straight through to fortnightly plans and the Cuntas Míosúil so nothing is written twice. Start your September plans free.