✖
Last Updated:
October 1, 2026
DETAILED GUIDE for ScHools and Colleges
Written By:
Liz Robson
Schools are facing a pivotal moment. In February 2026, the Department for Education published Every Child Achieving and Thriving, its SEND reform white paper, moving away from a rigid, diagnosis-led pathway toward a flexible model built around Universal, Targeted, Targeted Plus, and Specialist support.
For school leaders, this is a live, pressing question: does your school already have the capacity to deliver Targeted support well, before a pupil's needs escalate? This article sets out what that means in practice and argues that adolescent wellbeing coaching is one of the clearest examples of genuine Targeted-layer capacity a school can build in-house, sitting squarely within Targeted rather than Targeted Plus or Specialist provision.
Our whole school approach to positive mental health and wellbeing, combines positive and organisational psychology theory with mental health in schools guidelines and recommendations. Our system model represents the dynamic way mental health and wellbeing is developed in schools and colleges. We use it to provide a framework for planning, developing and embedding school wellbeing.
Mental health challenges among children and young people are escalating. Research indicates that between 1 in 6 and 1 in 4 young people struggle with mental health issues, and around half of adult mental health problems have their origins in adolescence. Poor childhood mental health affects learning, life outcomes, and physical wellbeing, and schools are increasingly expected to build the capacity to intervene early, before problems become entrenched.
That expectation now has a clearer structure behind it. Under the government's SEND reform plans, support in mainstream schools is organised across defined layers: a Universal Offer available to every pupil, a Targeted layer (including Targeted Plus) for pupils who need more than universal provision but not statutory or clinical intervention, and a Specialist layer for children with the most complex needs, underpinned by Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs). This article sets out what targeted support actually looks like against that framework, and where evidence-informed approaches like adolescent wellbeing coaching genuinely fit.
To understand where coaching sits within that picture, it helps to start with how we think about school wellbeing more broadly.
Our whole-school approach to wellbeing and inclusion combines positive and organisational psychology theory with mental health in schools guidelines and recommendations. Our systems model reflects how wellbeing actually develops: dynamically and unevenly, across a school or college community, rather than as a single fixed state. We use it to provide a framework for planning, developing and embedding school wellbeing, including the targeted, early support that sits at the heart of SEND reform.
As the Early Intervention Foundation defines it: "early intervention means identifying and providing effective early support to children and young people who are at risk of poor outcomes." That is, in essence, what the Targeted support layer exists to do, and it's the layer our framework is built to help schools deliver.
The government's SEND reform plans describe a "one education system" for all children and young people, including those with SEND, moving away from a rigid pathway where a pupil has to wait for a diagnosis or a formal assessment before receiving any structured help. At the base of that system is a Universal Offer: high-quality, inclusive teaching and everyday support available to every pupil, backed by £1.6 billion of government investment over three years specifically to make mainstream schools more inclusive.
For pupils who need more than the Universal Offer can provide, support is organised across two further layers:
A pupil can move between these layers as their needs change, rather than following a fixed, one-way escalation route. That flexibility is central to the reform: a pupil showing early signs of anxiety might need Targeted support for a term and nothing further, while another pupil's needs might genuinely require stepping up to Targeted Plus or Specialist provision, and, just as importantly, stepping back down again once things improve.
It's worth being honest about timing here too. As of late 2026, much of this detail, including the National Inclusion Standards and a revised SEND Code of Practice, is still being finalised, and the government has been explicit that its own milestones remain subject to change as legislation passes through Parliament. Schools shouldn't treat this as a system already fully in force; the practical task right now is building the capacity, workforce, and evidence base the new system will expect, not waiting for a single "go-live" date.
Early intervention is school-based mental health promotion designed to detect and respond quickly to pupils experiencing difficulties, so they remain engaged in learning rather than falling further behind. It isn't a separate layer of its own — it's a principle that runs across the Universal and Targeted layers already described above: whole-school culture, curriculum and everyday practice at the Universal level, and more individualised support for specific pupils or groups at the Targeted level.
Teams of teachers and practitioners deliver this through individual support, group work, parent support, and whole-class wellbeing teaching. The underlying principle is straightforward: prevention outperforms remediation. Addressing difficulties before they escalate produces better outcomes for both learning and long-term development, and is very often the more cost-effective route too, rather than waiting until a pupil's needs are severe enough to require Specialist provision.
Mental health need among young people has increased markedly, particularly since the pandemic, and demand on clinical services (CAMHS and equivalent) far outstrips current capacity. Long waiting times for assessment mean that difficulties which might have been addressed early, at the Targeted level, often continue to develop while a young person waits for specialist input.
This is precisely the gap the SEND reforms are trying to close. Rather than a rigid escalation pathway where a pupil must wait for a diagnosis or a place in the queue for specialist services before receiving any structured help, the reforms are designed to let schools intervene at the Targeted level far earlier, and to move pupils flexibly between layers according to need rather than bureaucratic threshold.
Schools are one of the most effective settings for early intervention, simply because they see the whole population of children and young people, not just those who have already been referred elsewhere. Many schools have appointed Senior Mental Health Leads (SMHLs) to build this capacity, with two central functions:
The SEND reforms add a second role into this picture: the Inclusion Lead. Where an SMHL's focus has traditionally centred on mental health and wellbeing specifically, Inclusion Leads are expected to hold the wider picture — the Universal Offer, the Targeted and Targeted Plus layers, and the school's annual Inclusion Strategy (replacing the current SEN Information Report). In many schools these will be different people working alongside each other; in smaller settings, one person may hold both remits. Either way, the two roles need to work closely together, since a pupil's barriers to learning rarely separate neatly into "wellbeing" and "SEND" — the same pupil showing early anxiety may also have an unidentified learning need, and vice versa.
Crucially, neither role exists just to manage referrals upward. Together, an SMHL and an Inclusion Lead are there to help the school build genuine Targeted-layer capacity of its own, whether that's coaching, small-group intervention, or another evidence-based approach, rather than relying solely on external, and often oversubscribed, specialist services.
Every child receiving Targeted support or above will have an Individual Support Plan (ISP) — a new, standardised plan being introduced under the SEND reforms to record a pupil's needs, the support in place, and the outcomes it's working toward. Unlike an EHC plan, an ISP is developed and owned by the school itself, in partnership with parents and carers, without requiring a formal statutory assessment.
Targeted support isn't delivered as a one-off decision, it follows a cycle set out in the SEND Code of Practice, known as the graduated approach: Assess, Plan, Do, Review.
This cycle repeats for as long as the pupil needs it. It's worth naming explicitly because it's the actual mechanism a school is using every time it commissions or delivers Targeted support — coaching isn't a replacement for this process, it's one of the things that can sit inside the "Do" stage.
Broadly, two approaches exist within targeted and universal provision for early prevention alike:
Problem-focused approaches aim to remove or reduce a specific issue: anxiety management, depression reduction, anti-bullying work, reducing barriers to learning or mental health stigma reduction.
Wellbeing-focused approaches build a sustainable capacity for thriving or flourishing, drawing on positive psychology, cultivating positive emotion, developing behaviours for learning, emotional understanding, strengths recognition, and resilience. This approach, sometimes called Positive Education, aims to prevent difficulties developing in the first place, rather than only responding once they've appeared. It maps closely onto the Targeted layer's stated purpose: early, evidence-based intervention before need escalates to Targeted Plus or Specialist provision.
Positive psychology research (drawing on Professor Corey Keyes' work on mental health as a spectrum, not a binary) identifies four broad positions:
This spectrum maps closely onto the SEND reform's tiers. Pupils who are languishing, or sit in the "moderate" band but show early signs of difficulty, are exactly the population the Targeted layer is meant to serve: not in crisis, not requiring an EHCP, but not thriving either, and genuinely at risk of moving toward diagnosable difficulty without the right support at the right time.
.png)
Under both the wellbeing literature and the SEND reform's own framing, certain groups are more likely to need Targeted, or in some cases Targeted Plus, support:
Where a pupil's needs are more complex, for example, requiring input from health as well as education professionals, that may indicate a need for Targeted Plus rather than Targeted support alone. Where needs are more complex still, and provision needs to be set out formally, that points toward the Specialist layer and, potentially, an EHCP.
Delivered well, Targeted support develops more than symptom reduction. Evidence and practice point to improvements in:
The starting point for any school is provision mapping, honestly cataloguing what's currently in place, and assessing whether it's actually fit for purpose, before adding anything new.
Common examples of Targeted-layer provision include:
Coaching is one of the more effective, and still under-recognised, approaches available at the Targeted layer specifically. To be clear about where it sits: coaching is not a specialist or clinical intervention, and it is not a substitute for counselling, CAMHS involvement, or other Specialist-layer provision where a pupil genuinely needs it. Coaches are trained to recognise when a referral onward is the right next step, rather than continuing to coach.
What distinguishes coaching from counselling is its orientation. Counselling typically addresses and supports emotional distress or trauma that has already taken hold, often over a longer period. Coaching is forward-looking and developmental: it helps a young person move from languishing toward moderate mental health, or from moderate mental health toward flourishing, through building skills and testing strategies out with a trained coach, rather than processing past distress. That makes it a strong fit for exactly the population the Targeted layer is designed around: pupils who aren't in crisis, but aren't thriving either.
The coaching relationship itself, a trusted adult who believes in the young person's capacity to change, is part of what makes it effective. It gives pupils a structured space to build self-awareness, emotional regulation, and confidence, motivating them to actually apply what they learn.
Schools have two broad options for introducing coaching: bringing in an external coaching provider, or training existing staff, pastoral leads, learning mentors, or teachers, to deliver coaching themselves. The second route builds capacity that stays embedded in the school for the long term, rather than depending on a contract that ends. It also means the Individual Support Plan process the SEND reforms require for pupils receiving Targeted or Specialist support can be delivered by staff who already know the pupil, rather than an unfamiliar external practitioner. Our accredited Adolescent Wellbeing Coaching programme trains practitioners to use coaching and provide targeted support in their roles, schools or settings.
Positive peer relationships meaningfully strengthen wellbeing, and peer-led approaches can succeed with young people who are resistant to adult-led support. Working with friendship pairs, where one pupil supports another's engagement, can be a genuinely effective, low-cost addition to Targeted provision.
With staff capacity already stretched, training pupils as wellbeing or mental health ambassadors increases a school's overall capacity to intervene early, addressing lower-level concerns, reducing stigma, and improving help-seeking behaviour. Worth-it's Wellbeing Ambassadors programme trains young people to offer informal one-to-one peer support, run drop-in sessions, and lead campaigns that reduce stigma around seeking help.
Where direct engagement with a young person isn't appropriate or isn't welcomed, working with parents and carers can still have a significant indirect impact, and is often a necessary part of the Individual Support Plan process for pupils receiving Targeted or Targeted Plus support.
Schools have developed a range of other early-prevention approaches, including wellbeing animals, outdoor learning, enrichment and sport and exercise integration. These sit best as part of the Universal Offer or as a complement to more structured Targeted provision, rather than as a targeted intervention in their own right.
When a school identifies a wellbeing need, one common temptation is to buy in more one-off or class-based workshops or lessons, a visiting speaker for the year group, a single assembly, a bought-in session on resilience or anxiety. It's an understandable response: it's quick to arrange, visible, and doesn't require building anything new internally.
But the evidence and our experience tells a more cautious story. Workshops of this kind can have limited effect, and in some cases may even make things worse for some pupils, surfacing difficult feelings or experiences in a one-off session with no structured follow-up can leave a pupil more exposed, not less.
More individualised, targeted interventions, matched to actual identified need, and embedded into a school's ongoing structures and systems rather than bought in as a single event, tend to be more sustainable, and can prove more cost-effective over time than repeatedly purchasing short or one-off interventions that don't build any lasting capacity. This is really the same argument made throughout this article for building Targeted-layer capacity in-house: a one-off workshop is bought and then it's gone, whereas a trained member of staff, or an embedded small-group programme, keeps delivering value long after the initial investment.
Three mechanisms tend to work together within a genuinely whole-school approach:
Addressing Persistent Absence
Attendance difficulty, including emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA), is one of the clearest signals that a pupil needs more than universal provision. School connectedness and supportive peer relationships are protective factors, which makes attendance work a natural and important part of Targeted provision, not a separate agenda from wellbeing.
Identifying At-Risk Cohorts
Schools already hold data that can flag groups at heightened risk, attendance records, behaviour logs, pupil premium status, prior safeguarding concerns. Using this data proactively, rather than only reactively, is central to delivering Targeted support well.
Knowing Individual Pupils
Perhaps the single most important mechanism: staff who know pupils well enough to notice a sudden change in mood or behaviour, and who have a clear pathway to act on that observation. This is more straightforward in primary settings, but secondary and FE settings can build equivalent opportunities through tutoring, mentoring, and tutor time. With the right training, any member of staff can learn to spot a concerning change and make an appropriate referral, in much the same way staff are already trained to recognise safeguarding concerns.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Identification tools and outcome measures work best when they're built into a school's referral pathway from the outset, not bolted on afterward. Screening within Specialist provision helps triage need appropriately; whole-school universal screening may be unnecessary where the mechanisms above are already working well. Whatever tools a school uses, they should map onto the same Universal / Targeted / Targeted Plus / Specialist structure the reforms describe, so a pupil's Individual Support Plan reflects a genuinely coherent picture of their need.
What is targeted support under the SEND reforms?
Targeted support is the layer of help a school provides when a pupil's needs go beyond what universal, whole-class teaching can meet, but don't require an Education, Health and Care Plan. It's delivered by the pupil's own school, recorded in an Individual Support Plan, and developed in partnership with parents and carers.
What's the difference between Targeted and Targeted Plus support?
Targeted support is delivered entirely within the pupil's own school by trained staff. Targeted Plus involves additional input from external education and health professionals — for example through the new Experts at Hand service or an inclusion base — for needs that are more complex or persistent, but still short of requiring an EHCP.
Does a pupil need a diagnosis or an EHCP to receive targeted support?
No. Targeted support is designed to be accessed without a formal diagnosis or statutory assessment. It's agreed through the school's own graduated approach (assess, plan, do, review) and recorded in an Individual Support Plan.
What is an Individual Support Plan?
An Individual Support Plan (ISP) is a plan developed by the school, with parents and carers, that records a pupil's needs, the support being provided, and the outcomes it's working toward. It applies to any pupil receiving Targeted support or above, and doesn't require the formal statutory process an EHCP does.
Is adolescent wellbeing coaching the same as counselling?
No. Coaching is forward-looking and developmental — it helps a young person build on their strengths, set goals, and move from languishing toward flourishing. It isn't a clinical or therapeutic intervention, and it isn't a substitute for counselling or CAMHS support where that's what's needed. It sits within the Targeted layer as a structured, evidence-informed intervention a school can deliver itself. Find out more about the differences bettwen counselling and coaching.
Who decides whether a pupil needs targeted support?
Usually a member of school staff — often the SENCo, a pastoral lead, or the Senior Mental Health Lead — identifies the need through the assess stage of the graduated approach, using a combination of staff observation, attendance and behaviour data, and information from parents and carers.
None of this works as a set of disconnected interventions. It requires a whole-school approach, where staff share a common understanding of how wellbeing is supported across every layer, from the Universal Offer through to Specialist provision. Done well, this is itself protective: pupils learn wellbeing strategies through consistent, everyday practice, not only through formal intervention when things have already gone wrong.
If you're not sure where to start, or how targeted support fits against everything else already on your school development plan, our free Inclusion and Wellbeing Planning Tool is designed for exactly this. It walks you through a structured self-assessment of your current provision across universal, targeted and specialist support, helping you identify where targeted support fits within your current school development priorities before you commit to any particular approach.
Use the Inclusion and Wellbeing Planning Tool
If you're a school leader, pastoral lead, inclusion lead, senior mental health lead, or youth or family support worker wanting to see what this looks like in practice, Worth-it runs a free introduction to coaching young people: an introductory training course, a real-world case study from a school leader already using coaching, and a live workshop exploring how it works in a school setting. It's a practical, no-obligation way to see how coaching fits into your Targeted-layer offer before committing to anything further.
Register for the free introduction to coaching for young people training bundle.
