In this paper, the higher order cell-based smoothed finite element method based on the first-order shear deformation theory is used for the analysis of laminated composite plates. The domain is discretized with eight-node Mindlin plate elements of serendipity family (Q8 elements). Higher order finite element with Q8 elements using the selectively reduced integration is known to alleviate the shear-locking phenomenon. However, it still produces shear-locking phenomenon below a certain thickness-span ratio and also yields poor solutions and sub-optimal convergence rates with distorted meshes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to eradicate the shear-locking phenomenon and improve the quality of the solutions by employed a linear smoothing technique. Within this technique, each Q8 element is subdivided into eight smoothing cells, and a modified strain is computed over the smoothing cell by using a linear smoothing procedure. The modified bending strain and shear strain are computed by the divergence theorem between the nodal shape functions and their derivatives in Taylor’s expansion within each smoothing cell. Several numerical examples indicate that the novel approach can eradicate the shear-locking and also yield more reliable results for the distorted meshes.