Abstract This is the first part of a two-part paper dedicated to a new plate theory for out-of-plane loaded thick plates where the static unknowns are those of the Kirchhoff–Love theory (3 in-plane stresses and 3 bending moments), to which six components are added representing the gradient of the bending moment. The new theory, called the Bending-Gradient plate theory is described in the present paper. It is an extension to arbitrarily layered plates of the Reissner–Mindlin plate theory which appears as a special case of the Bending-Gradient plate theory when the plate is homogeneous. However, we demonstrate also that, in the general case, the Bending-Gradient model cannot be reduced to a Reissner–Mindlin model. In part two ( Lebee and Sab, 2011 ), the Bending-Gradient theory is applied to multilayered plates and its predictions are compared to those of the Reissner–Mindlin theory and to full 3D Pagano’s exact solutions. The main conclusion of the second part is that the Bending-Gradient gives good predictions of both deflection and shear stress distributions in any material configuration. Moreover, under some symmetry conditions, the Bending-Gradient model coincides with the second-order approximation of the exact solution as the slenderness ratio L/h goes to infinity.