How to get an EHC plan for your child

Anyone can ask the local authority to carry out an education, health and care needs assessment. Parents, the school or nursery, a doctor, a health visitor, a family friend — any of them can make the request, and a young person aged 16 to 25 can request one for themselves. Parents who have been told they must go through the school first have been told something that is not the law.

Put the request in writing to the local authority's SEND team, dated, and keep a copy with proof of sending. The date of the request starts the statutory clock, and disputes about when the clock started are common enough that the proof matters.

Write the request around the two statutory questions: that the child may have special educational needs, and that they may need provision to be made through a plan. Describe the needs, describe what the school is already doing, and explain why that is not enough — not that the school is failing, but that the child's needs go beyond what can reasonably be provided from the school's own resources.

Attach the evidence you have rather than waiting to gather more. School reports and assessment data showing a widening gap, records of SEN support cycles, a SENCO's own view, clinic letters, speech and language therapy reports, an educational psychologist's report if one exists, a paediatric diagnosis, CAMHS correspondence, attendance data if anxiety is affecting it, and your own account of what happens at home.

Include the non-educational picture. Sleep, self-care, safety, behaviour that escalates, the child's own words about school, and what family life looks like on a bad week. A plan covers education, health and care, and evidence about all three supports the case.

The authority must decide within six weeks whether to carry out an assessment, and must tell you its reasons if it refuses. A refusal to assess is appealable, and appeals against refusals to assess are the most frequently upheld category — that is a reason to appeal rather than to resubmit.

Get help. IPSEA provides free legal-based advice and model letters, and every local authority area must have an Information, Advice and Support Service, which is free and independent of the authority's decision-making. A request written using a model letter is materially harder to refuse than one written from scratch.

If the authority agrees to assess, it gathers advice: from you, from the child or young person, from the school, from an educational psychologist, from health, from social care, and from anyone else with relevant expertise. Those who are asked must normally respond within six weeks.

You can ask for advice from a specific professional to be sought, and you can commission your own reports privately. Independent reports carry real weight, particularly where the authority's own educational psychology capacity is stretched, and a private speech and language or occupational therapy assessment is often the difference between vague and specified provision.

By week 16 the authority must tell you whether it is going to make a plan. A decision not to issue a plan after assessing is separately appealable, and again the reasons must be given.

If it decides to issue one, you receive a draft with Section I — the school placement — left blank. You then have at least 15 days to comment and to request a particular school or type of setting. Use them. This is the stage where provision is negotiated, and it is far easier to get wording changed in the draft than after the final plan is issued.

You can request a mainstream school, a maintained special school, an academy, an independent special school on the authority's published list, or a further education college. The authority must name your preference unless the placement would be unsuitable for the child's age, ability, aptitude or needs, would be incompatible with the efficient education of others, or would be an inefficient use of resources. Those are the only lawful reasons for refusing a preference.

The final plan must be issued within 20 weeks of the original request. Exceptions exist for exceptional circumstances, but chronic under-resourcing is not one of them, and a missed deadline is maladministration you can complain about while pressing on with the substance.

Once the final plan is issued, the authority is under a duty to secure the special educational provision in Section F. That duty is absolute in the sense that lack of funding is not a defence, and it is enforceable — ultimately by judicial review, though in practice by escalation, complaint and the tribunal.

The plan is structured in lettered sections and each does a different job. Section A records the views of the child and family. Sections B, C and D describe special educational, health and social care needs. Sections E covers outcomes. Section F is the special educational provision. Sections G and H are health and social care provision. Section I names the placement. Section J covers any personal budget and Section K lists the advice received.

Section F is the section that matters legally, because it is the one the authority must secure. Health provision in Section G is the responsibility of the health commissioner, and social care in Section H sits with the local authority's social care duties — different duties with different enforcement routes.

Provision must be specified and quantified. The test to apply to every line is whether an incoming teacher, a new therapist or a tribunal could read it and know exactly what has to happen: what, how much, how often, by whom, with what qualification, and where. Anything that fails that test should be challenged at draft stage.

Watch for needs described in Section B that have no corresponding provision in Section F. This is the most common structural defect in a plan: a need is acknowledged and then nothing is promised to meet it. Cross-reference the two sections line by line.

Outcomes in Section E should be specific and measurable, and provision should be traceable to them. Vague aspirations such as 'will make progress in literacy' give nothing to review against at the annual review.

A personal budget can be requested where a plan is in place or has been agreed. It can be a direct payment, a notional arrangement where the authority or school holds the money but you direct it, or a third-party arrangement. Direct payments for the educational element are limited to particular circumstances, so ask what is actually available rather than assuming.

The plan must be reviewed at least annually — more often for very young children — and the review is not merely a meeting. The authority must decide after it whether to maintain, amend or cease the plan, and it must notify you of that decision. Amendment decisions and cessation decisions both carry appeal rights, which parents frequently do not realise until the deadline has gone.

You can appeal a refusal to assess, a refusal to issue a plan after assessment, the description of needs in Section B, the provision in Section F, the placement in Section I, a decision to amend, and a decision to cease a plan. Health and social care elements can be brought in as recommendations through the tribunal's extended powers, though the enforcement route for those differs.

Before lodging most appeals you must contact a mediation adviser and obtain a mediation certificate. You do not have to attend mediation itself — you only have to consider it and get the certificate — and the certificate is what the tribunal requires. Appeals about the placement named in Section I alone are exempt from the mediation requirement.

The appeal goes to the First-tier Tribunal, Special Educational Needs and Disability. It is free, it is independent of the local authority, and parents regularly appear without lawyers. The deadline is normally two months from the decision letter or one month from the mediation certificate, whichever is later — read the decision letter for the exact date.

Prepare the appeal around evidence rather than argument. Independent professional reports, school data showing lack of progress, the authority's own advice where it supports you, and a clear statement of the wording you want in each disputed section. Tribunals appreciate a parent who arrives with a marked-up draft plan showing precisely what they are asking for.

Local authorities concede a substantial proportion of appeals before the hearing, often after seeing the parent's evidence bundle. That is not a reason to relax — it is a reason to put the evidence in early and properly, because a well-evidenced appeal is one that gets conceded rather than heard.

Where the complaint is about delay, process failures or the authority's conduct rather than the content of a decision, that is a complaint to the local authority and then to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, which has been consistently critical of SEND delay. Run it in parallel with the appeal rather than instead of it.

Where the authority is failing to deliver provision that a final plan already specifies, that is not a tribunal matter — the plan is not in dispute. The route is complaint, escalation and ultimately judicial review to enforce the statutory duty. Take legal advice, because this is one of the areas where legal aid can be available.

EHC plans exist in England only. The Children and Families Act 2014 Part 3 does not extend to the other nations, and a parent moving across a border will find not merely different forms but a different legal concept.

Scotland uses additional support for learning under the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004. The statutory document is the co-ordinated support plan, and it is far narrower in scope than an EHC plan — it is issued only where support is needed from outside education services, from the health service or social work, and where those needs are significant and enduring. Most Scottish children with additional support needs never have a CSP, and support is provided under the general duty instead. Disputes go through mediation, dispute resolution, or to the Additional Support Needs jurisdiction of the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland, and Enquire is the national advice service.

Wales replaced statements with individual development plans under the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018. An IDP covers additional learning needs from birth to 25 and can be maintained by a school or by the local authority depending on the level of need, which is a structural difference from England, where only the authority issues a plan. Disputes go to the Education Tribunal for Wales.

Northern Ireland still uses statements of special educational need, issued by the Education Authority after a statutory assessment under Northern Irish special educational needs legislation. The process — request, assessment, proposed statement, final statement, annual review — will look familiar to anyone who remembers the pre-2014 English system, because it derives from the same origins. Appeals go to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal for Northern Ireland.

The practical consequences of moving are significant. An EHC plan does not transfer into a Scottish CSP or a Welsh IDP automatically; the receiving authority carries out its own assessment under its own law, and provision can change substantially. Families moving between UK nations with a child who has significant needs should start that conversation with the receiving authority months in advance, not on arrival.

What is common across all four systems is the evidential logic. Whoever issues the document, the case is made by professional evidence describing what the child cannot do, what is needed to change that, and how much of it is required. A parent who assembles that evidence has the strongest position available in any of the four jurisdictions.