Planning as a SET or EAL teacher: what changes when the class is not the unit

Nearly every piece of planning advice for Irish primary teachers makes the same silent assumption: you have a class. One room, one level, one long-term plan per subject. For thousands of Special Education Teachers and EAL teachers, none of that describes the job. Your unit of planning is not a class; it is a caseload spread across half the school.

Here is how the standard planning framework translates when you are the SET.

The shape of SET planning

Class teachers plan subjects across a year. SETs plan pupils and groups across a support cycle. The working pieces:

• The caseload and timetable. Who you see, in what groupings, when, and whether support is in-class or withdrawal. This is the SET equivalent of the class timetable, and it is the first thing to rebuild each September because it changes every year.
• Student support files. For each pupil on the continuum of support, the support file carries the story: identified needs, targets, actions, and review. This is where individual planning lives, and keeping it current matters more than any scheme.
• Targets, not topics. SET short-term planning is built around specific, observable targets for a pupil or group over a defined block, commonly a term or an instructional block of six to eight weeks, with a review at the end. “Reads and writes the first 100 high-frequency words” is a plan; “literacy support” is a timetable entry.
• Group plans. Where pupils with similar targets are grouped, one plan per group covering its focus, approaches and progress notes is both sufficient and saner than per-pupil duplication of the same content.

The review rhythm is the part that repays the effort: targets set early in the term, evidence gathered along the way, reviewed and reset at the end. A support file whose targets are reviewed on time is worth more, to the child and in any inspection, than beautiful paperwork that never loops back.

Where EAL fits

EAL planning follows the same target-based logic, with one key difference: the organising variable is language proficiency, not class level. A newcomer in 5th Class and one in 2nd may share a proficiency band and a group. Plan by band: assess proficiency on entry, set language targets across listening, spoken production, reading and writing, and review on the same cycle as other support. Language support that follows the class topic works best when the plan says so explicitly, because it tells the class teacher what the EAL time is doing for their curriculum.

The Cuntas Míosúil for support teachers

The SET Cuntas records the same thing a class teacher’s does, what actually happened against what was planned, but organised by group and target rather than by subject. Groups seen, focus of the work, movement toward targets, anything that changed shape mid-month. The twenty-minute routine applies unchanged; only the headings differ.

September, in order

The SET September is its own checklist: caseload confirmed with the principal, timetable built around the class timetables, support files reviewed and carried forward, baseline and proficiency assessments run in the first weeks, targets set, group plans written. Then the year runs on review cycles rather than terms of content.

Where Pleanáil fits

Pleanáil supports composite planning across multiple class levels, built originally for SETs and multigrade teachers: one plan can hold curriculum content from every level your caseload spans, so a group drawn from 1st, 3rd and 5th does not need three parallel documents. Curriculum content for every level is there to select rather than retype, and the Cuntas builds from whatever you planned. Set up your support planning free.