Some unreasonable results from the use of a popular thick plate element are discovered from the analysis of a raft foundation and a pile cap in Hong Kong. To overcome the problems, the authors have developed a new shear deformable beam which can be extended to a general quadrilateral shear deformable plate. The behaviour of this new element under several interesting cases is investigated, and it is demonstrated that the new element possesses very high accuracy under different depth/span ratios, and the results from this new element are good even for a coarse mesh.