Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to improve the capacity of local authorities to assess children for the purposes of 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 that 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 recognises the critical role of educational psychologists within the special education needs and disabilities (SEND) system, including in their statutory contribution to EHC assessments. To support this, we are investing over £21 million to train 400 more educational psychologists from 2024. This builds on the £10 million currently being invested in a cohort of over 200 trainees who began their training in September 2023. As these trainees complete their studies, they will join the workforce to support the capacity of local authority educational psychology services, including in delivering assessments.

Furthermore, the department is providing almost £1 billion more for high needs budgets in the 2025/26 financial year, bringing total high needs funding to £11.9 billion. This funding will help local authorities and schools with the increasing costs of supporting children and young people with complex SEND.

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 SEND adviser support to help identify the barriers to EHC plan process timeliness and put in place practical plans for recovery.