Sharon Hodgson – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sharon Hodgson on 2016-02-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 28 January 2016 to Question 23325, how many local authorities received advice from her Department on Education, Health and Care plans that were considered to be non-compliant with statutory requirements in 2015.

Edward Timpson

Since September 2014, Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans have been regularly monitored and reviewed. This is part of the Department’s ongoing work to support and challenge local authorities’ implementation of the reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) system. The Department also gathers information about EHC plans from parents and young people, through termly surveys of Parent Carer Forums, correspondence, and regular dialogue with parents’ and young people’s groups.

Where individual EHC plans are considered not to be fully compliant, advice on how to improve them has been provided directly to the local authorities concerned by the Department’s team of SEND advisors. Thus far, our SEND advisors have noted issues around non-compliance for 29 local authorities, all of which were subsequently given advice about improving their EHC plans in order to fulfil statutory requirements

Our advisors are currently delivering a number of workshops for local authorities on how to write high quality, legally compliant EHC plans, and to share good practice. The training resources from these workshops will be published shortly.

There are a number of places where local authorities can find guidance about EHC plans. This includes the statutory SEND Code of Practice, which clearly sets out what must be included in a plan, and provides detailed guidance on the process that must be followed to produce one. There are also examples of good quality EHC plans produced by the SEND Pathfinder local authorities.

The review of EHC plans carried out in 2014 looked specifically at EHC plan templates.