Significant advances have been made in recent years to improve photon dose calculation. However, accurate prediction of dose perturbation effects near the interfaces of different media, where charged particle equilibrium is not established, remain unsolved. Furthermore, changes in atomic number, which affect the multiple Coulomb scattering of the secondary electrons, are not accounted for by current photon dose calculation algorithms. As local interface effects are mainly due to the perturbation of secondary electrons, a photon–electron cascade model is proposed which incorporates explicit electron transport in the calculation of the primary photon dose component in heterogeneous media. The primary photon beam is treated as the source of many electron pencil beams. The latter are transported using the Fermi–Eyges theory. The scattered photon dose contribution is calculated with the dose spread array [T. R. Mackie, J. W. Scrimger, and J. J. Battista, Med. Phys. 12, 188–196 (1985)] approach. Comparisons of the calculation with Monte Carlo simulation and TLD measurements show good agreement for positions near the polystyrene–aluminum interfaces.