Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to tackle backlogs in the processing of statutory assessments for education, health and care plans.

The department wants to ensure that, where required, education, health and care (EHC) plan assessments are progressed promptly and, if needed, plans are issued as quickly as possible so that children and young people can access the support they need.

Local authorities have a statutory responsibility to assess whether children and young people have special educational needs that require an EHC plan. EHC plans must be issued within 20 weeks of the needs assessment commencing so that children and young people can access the support they need. The most recent dataset shows there were 138,200 initial requests for an EHC plan and 90,500 assessments took place in 2023. 50.3% of new EHC plans in 2023 were issued within 20 weeks.

The department knows that local authorities have seen an increase in the number of assessment requests and that more needs to be done to ensure that local areas deliver effective and timely services. This includes better communication with schools and families.

The department continues to monitor and work closely with local authorities that have issues with EHC plan timeliness. Where there are concerns about a local authority’s capacity to make the required improvements, we help the local authority to identify the problems and put in place an effective recovery plan. This includes, where needed, securing specialist special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) adviser support to help identify the barriers to EHC plan process timeliness and put in place practical plans for recovery.

Central Bedfordshire underwent an Ofsted and Care Quality Commission joint area SEND inspection in October 2019, with the report published in February 2020. The local area was required to produce a written statement of action to address six significant weaknesses. During a revisit in July 2022, Ofsted found sufficient progress in three of the six areas. Consequently, the area was required to produce an accelerated progress plan to outline the necessary improvements for the remaining three areas.