One of the most notable elements of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan published last week was the promise of online education, health and care plans (EHCPs). 

“Digital systems can deliver better experiences for both families and professionals and enable them to continuously improve their services - focusing staff time on working with families rather than managing bureaucracy,” the report said.

Electronic EHCPs would almost certainly be universally welcomed by Sendcos, who have the responsibility for overseeing and monitoring the provision and outcomes stated within them in schools.

Reducing administration

After all, if it achieves the ultimate Sendco goal of increased in-school productivity then that can only be a good thing.

Currently, the burden of paperwork, form-filling, manual data input, gathering, interpreting and writing reports can be overwhelming.

As such, simplifying the process and gaining time to spend on direct intervention, staff training, delivering in-school improvements and establishing local networks could be greatly advantageous to the children, young people and families we are there to assist.

Some local authorities are trialling digital EHCPs already: Ealing, Bromley, Devon, Leicester and Northamptonshire, to name a few.

It will be interesting to follow how the experiences of those involved are to be captured, reported, reviewed and the feedback incorporated into improvements as the technology evolves.

Why getting the technology right is paramount

Because issues arising must be identified, teething issues addressed and functionality evaluated. The implementation of a full national roll out in Phase 3 is not set to occur until 2025. That rollout itself is “dependent on digital solutions tested and agreed upon”.

That is a short sentence but one that cannot be overstated in its importance.

Getting this right at scale is vital because while the digitising of EHCPs is not on the same scale as, say, the disastrous attempts to IT reform of the NHS patient record system ten years ago, it is nonetheless an epic overhaul of a system with society’s most vulnerable members at its heart.

There will be a huge impact on thousands of educational staff who access, update and administer EHCPs every day.

For example, the government’s most recently published SEND census data reveals that 4 per cent of England’s school pupils have an EHCP, a total of 355,566. Legal responsibility for maintaining them lies with local authorities, of which 152 nationally have jurisdiction for education.

They, in turn, are filled with local authority caseworkers who engage with the EHCPs in their remit.

At a local Sendco forum recently, we were shown a list of the local authority caseworkers responsible for drafting, writing and overseeing all the EHCPs in the borough. I counted 16.

Digital skills required

Let’s assume, then, that there are around 16 caseworkers in each borough. This is an estimated average. According to the latest data, The Isles of Scilly, the smallest local authority, has 151 primary pupils; Kent, the largest, has almost 127,000. But let’s assume an average of 16 SEND caseworkers per area.

That is approaching 2,500 local authority staff who must become proficient in new digital systems.

That’s even before we consider senior SEND team leaders who lead on software and service acquisition, or administrative workers who will have to master the software.

Then we get to school staff. The SEND Code of Practice stipulates that every state school - state-maintained schools, academies, colleges, alternative provisions and pupil referral units, including nurseries and those for 16- to 19-year-olds - must have a qualified teacher designated as Sendco.

This equates to over 20,000 schools in England. So over 20,000 Sendcos must learn new digital systems. Plus, special school staff who administer EHCPs.

Add to this the external professionals from health and social care who contribute: educational psychologists; occupational therapists; speech and language therapists; nurses; consultant teams; mobility specialists; specialist advisory teachers; social workers; and more.

Finally, but we should consider them foremost, there are the families themselves. They may also have to become confident and capable at using digital forms to access, upload, amend and review important information.

We must not make SEND bureaucracy even worse

There will be implications for accessibility and training, which should be pre-empted before they are required.

The figures above are “back of a fag packet” maths. But it is clear there are thousands of local authority staff, tens of thousands of teachers and health and social care professionals, hundreds of thousands of families, and millions of pages of documentation that must be considered with any move online for EHCPs.

There is a huge risk of an ill-thought-out or badly managed transfer to digital EHCPs.

There are risks of local authorities not responding to requests for assessment, to annual reviews, to transitional requirements or to changes in circumstance in a timely and appropriate manner. There are challenges to Sendcos navigating the transition to new software while maintaining provision. 

Any resultant breakdown of or delay in process, increase in Sendco workload or loss of provision could have terrible consequences for the young people the EHCP system is designed to support. 

Without central government planning for the national rollout, there is the danger of many IT providers crowding into the marketplace for delivery, or for local developments to introduce clunky, user-unfriendly systems.

Already, several providers exist for proactive local authorities involved in trials. It is vital that these systems cohesively interact across boundary lines.

The bureaucracy of the current labour-intensive paper-based system must not be replicated electronically.

Deborah Hollingsworth is assistant principal for Inclusion and Sendco at a school in north London. She has over 20 years of experience in middle and senior leadership in both mainstream and specialist schools. She tweets at @debs_cares