The short answer
When a child needs help from both healthcare and social services at the same time, Swedish law gives them a right to have those bodies sit down together and write one shared plan. It is called a samordnad individuell plan, a coordinated individual plan, almost always shortened to SIP. The point is simple: the people responsible for the child coordinate with each other, so the family does not have to be the switchboard between a psychologist, a social worker and a school.
The catch that trips up a lot of families is this: the school is not automatically one of the parties with a duty to call a SIP. The statutory duty sits on the kommun (through socialtjänsten) and the region (through hälso- och sjukvården). The school can, and often should, take part. But the plan that coordinates a neurodivergent child’s world is anchored in two laws that are not Skollagen, and knowing that changes how a family asks for it.
What the law says
There are two mirror provisions, one in each of the responsible bodies’ own laws.
On the social services side, the new Socialtjänstlag (2025:400), which replaced the old law, places the duty in 10 kap. 8 §: “Om en enskild har behov av insatser både från socialtjänsten och från hälso- och sjukvården, ska kommunen tillsammans med regionen upprätta en individuell plan.” (If a person has needs for measures from both the social services and healthcare, the municipality together with the region shall draw up an individual plan.)
On the healthcare side, Hälso- och sjukvårdslagen (2017:30) says the same thing from the region’s point of view, in 16 kap. 4 §: “Om en enskild har behov av insatser både från hälso- och sjukvården och socialtjänsten, ska regionen tillsammans med kommunen upprätta en individuell plan.”
The two provisions are deliberately identical. Whichever body notices the need first carries the duty to reach for the other. The plan is drawn up when either the kommun or the region judges it is needed for the person to get their needs met, and it requires the person’s consent. The work on it is to begin genast, at once.
By law the plan must set out four things: which measures are needed, which body is responsible for each of them, which actions are to be taken by someone other than the kommun or region, and which of the two bodies has the overall responsibility for the plan. In other words, it closes the exact gap that hurts children most: the space between services where nobody is quite in charge.
Where the school fits
Here is the part that is widely misunderstood, so it is worth stating plainly. Preschools, schools and the elevhälsa (student health team) do not have a statutory duty to call a SIP. The duty in the Socialtjänstlag and Hälso- och sjukvårdslagen falls on the kommun and the region, not on the school as a school.
That does not mean the school is shut out. A school can take part in a SIP, and for a neurodivergent child it usually should, because the school is where the child spends the day and where much of the support is actually delivered. Many regions and municipalities have local agreements that let a school flag the need for a SIP, or even call one, when it judges that help needs coordinating. So in practice a school can be the one who says “these services are not talking to each other, we need a SIP,” even though the formal duty to arrange it lands elsewhere.
The reason this matters: a family whose child is stuck between a long BUP queue, a stretched social services contact and a school delivering särskilt stöd can ask the school to raise a SIP, and can ask socialtjänsten or the region to arrange one. Knowing which door has the legal duty behind it, and which door is a matter of local agreement, is the difference between a request that gets actioned and one that gets passed around.
A SIP is not an åtgärdsprogram, and neither one waits for the other
It is easy to blur these together because both are plans about a struggling child. They are not the same instrument and they do not live in the same law.
An åtgärdsprogram is a school-internal document under Skollagen. It sets out the särskilt stöd a student will receive and is decided by the school alone. A SIP is a cross-sector plan under the Socialtjänstlag and Hälso- och sjukvårdslagen that coordinates the kommun and the region. A child can have one, both, or neither, and the existence of one does not discharge the duty behind the other.
This distinction carries a practical warning. A school cannot park its own Skollagen duties while everyone waits for a SIP to be arranged, and a family should not accept “we are waiting for the SIP” as a reason for support to stall. The school’s duty to give extra anpassningar and särskilt stöd is triggered by the student’s needs and does not wait for a diagnosis, let alone for a multi-agency meeting to be booked. In a system where the neuropsychiatric assessment can take a year or more and the elevhälsa is itself stretched thin, the SIP is the coordination layer on top, not a precondition for the school to act.
Why this is Nuro’s lane
A SIP is only as good as the shared picture the parties bring to the table. When the school arrives with a vague sense that a student is “struggling,” the meeting spends its time reconstructing the basics. When the school arrives with a clear, documented account of what the student needs, what has been tried, and what is and is not working, the meeting can spend its time on decisions.
That documented account is exactly what Nuro builds, per student, as an ordinary by-product of the support the school is already giving. For a child who is also seeing BUP or social services, this is the difference between a school that is a passive attendee at the SIP and one that is the best-informed party in the room. It also means that if a child has more than one thing going on at once, the school can describe the whole picture rather than one slice of it.
The coordination the SIP forces between services is the same principle Nuro applies inside the school itself: one clear, shared, documented picture of the student, so that support does not depend on any single adult remembering the whole story.