The government is currently unable to hold the special educational needs and disabilities system to account properly because it doesn’t collect data on whether education, health and care plan (EHCP) targets are being met, a Department for Education adviser has said.
David Thomas, who was involved in the production of the government’s SEND Green Paper, has said that, currently, the DfE does not know whether the aims and targets set out in EHCP documents are being delivered for pupils.
During the same debate, a SEND expert voiced concern that the government’s Green Paper has not looked in detail at problems with the assessment of needs for EHCPs.
The government’s SEND Green Paper, published just over a month ago, set out plans to standardise and digitise the EHCP process “to minimise bureaucracy and deliver consistency”.
EHCPs were introduced in the 2014 SEND reforms replacing statements of special educational needs.
EHCPs are a legal document setting out a child’s needs and how they will be met. They were created with the aim of bringing together education, health and care sectors to ensure pupils with SEND had their needs met.
However, since the reforms were introduced, the SEND system in schools has been in an escalating crisis with significant weaknesses in provision being identified in more than half the local authority areas in the country that have been inspected.
This included plans being out of date and intended targets and outcomes being too vague or lacking aspiration.
Mr Thomas, a DfE policy adviser who has been seconded to the role from the Astrea Academies Trust where he works as a regional director, said one of the issues is that the impact EHCPs have is not being centrally recorded.
He said: “What we see when we look at EHCPs is that there is not very much guidance on what they should be other than the chapter headings. So you see very different formats and level of detail across local areas.”
He pointed to research from children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza, who found major differences in the way EHCPs are produced.
Mr Thomas continued: “In one local authority it might be incredibly specific with a set of actions sitting behind them, and others might be completely generic.
“Nowhere in the system, even where we do have time-bound targets that are very specific, are we tracking what proportion of children with EHCPs actually meet the targets we’re putting all of this funding into.
“Are we actually delivering for the child at the end of it? That is not a metric that we know about in our system. It’s not something we record.”
He highlighted this as an issue for the government to address.
“A question that has been asked rightly by a lot of people is how has it taken so long to do the SEND Review if we accept that the 2014 reforms were the right intentions but didn’t get implemented - why so long for a new review?
“Actually, there isn’t the data coming out that allows you to be able to steer it because you have huge reams of paper in plans that don’t feed through for you to be able to get a good national picture.
“So I think there is definitely something to do for us to do about making sure that we are recording the data, we need to hold our system to account and a good start would be asking whether or not we’re actually meeting the targets set out in EHCPs.”
During the same panel discussion, Emily Ellington, doctoral researcher and former local authority head of SEND and inclusion, questioned why the government’s Green Paper had not done more to address problems with the assessment of education, health and care needs.
She said: “I was really surprised in the Green Paper to see a complete omission of the education, health and care needs assessment process itself.
“I know there is talk of a national template that has been digitised...but, at the moment, we are at a situation where pretty much half of education, health and care needs assessments are not being completed within 20 weeks.”
She added: “I don’t think we are in a place where that assessment process is as good as it could be. I don’t think it is truly child or family centred in every place...I think the EHCP needs assessment process really needs looking at in terms of how it can be improved.”
The government’s SEND Green Paper set out a series of recommendations, which are now being consulted upon. These can be read in full here.
Tes Magazine Education Insights is a new offering from Tes magazine that features a monthly in-depth report on the education sector alongside a webinar featuring leading figures from schools, education research and the commercial sector. You can download the latest report and webinar, on the topic of SEND, for free here
You need a Tes subscription to read this article
Subscribe now to read this article and get other subscriber-only content:
