Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an estimate of the average length of time that an Education, Health and Care plan takes to be drafted for an individual child.

The government continues to support local authorities with their core budgets, which have increased to £59.7 billion for the next financial year. Local authorities have the flexibility to spend according to local needs and priorities, including to undertake Education, Health and Care (EHC) needs assessments.

Where an EHC plan is issued by a local authority, the local authority is under a statutory duty to secure the special educational provision set out in the EHC plan. Local areas will have their own arrangements to allocate the funding necessary to secure this provision, using the local authority’s High Needs Budget.

High needs revenue funding for children and young people with complex special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is increasing to £10.1 billion for the 2023/24 financial year, which is an increase of nearly £1 billion from last year’s allocations and over 50% from the 2019/20 allocations.

Every local authority in England will see a minimum per-head increase of 9.8% in their total high needs allocations in 2023/24 compared to 2022/23.

The local authority must complete the whole EHC process as soon as practicable, and in any event, within 20 weeks of the local authority receiving a request for an EHC needs assessment, as per The Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014.

Information on EHC plans is collected as part of the annual Special Education Needs 2 (SEN2) data collection and is published in the ‘Education, Health and Care Plans’ statistical publication, available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/education-health-and-care-plans.

The department does not currently hold the average length of time that an EHC plan takes to be drafted for an individual child. To provide this would incur disproportionate cost.