Friday Intervention Planning Review: A Weekly Routine

The most useful planning habit in intervention work may be the shortest: a review at the end of each week. A few minutes on Friday afternoon turns a messy week into a clean start on Monday, and saves the Sunday night scramble. Here is a simple routine you can reuse every week.

Why Friday?

On Friday, the week is still fresh in your mind. You know which sessions were missed, which materials ran out and what was promised in meetings. By Monday, much of that is forgotten. Reviewing on Friday also means next week’s preparation can start early.

The five-step Friday review

1. Look back at this week

Open All Tasks and select each day of the past week in the week strip. For each session, ask: did it happen as planned?

2. Record and reschedule

Make sure every delivered session has been recorded in your school’s approved system. For sessions that were missed or cut short, follow your school’s guidance on making them up, and add any rescheduled sessions as new tasks.

3. Clear finished tasks

Delete prep and follow-up tasks you’ve finished. A clean list makes next week easier to read. Keep anything that still needs action, and move its date forward.

4. Set up next week

Switch to Upcoming and check next week’s sessions are all there with the right times and places. Then add preparation for each session (see the preparation checklist) and any follow-ups from this week’s meetings.

5. Check for conflicts and priorities

Compare next week with the school calendar. Look for assemblies, testing, trips and early dismissals. Then review priorities: upgrade tasks that are now close, and make sure High tasks are a short list. The manual conflict check walks through this.

Friday review checklist

• Every session this week accounted for
• Delivery recorded in the approved system
• Missed sessions rescheduled where appropriate
• Finished tasks deleted
• Next week’s sessions confirmed
• Prep added for every session
• Meeting follow-ups added
• Calendar clashes fixed
• Priorities reviewed

Make it stick

• Schedule the review itself. Add a Friday task for each of the next few weeks, such as “Weekly review – log delivery, plan next week”, so it has a fixed time like any session.
• Keep it short. If it regularly takes much longer than twenty minutes, your daily follow-up slots are probably too small.
• Do it before you leave. Reviews postponed to the weekend rarely happen, or ruin the weekend when they do.

Related: weekly intervention task planning · the 30-minute intervention block