Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of reducing eligibility for Education, Health and Care Plans to only the most complex cases on equality of access to specialist educational support; and what steps she is taking to ensure that children with moderate but persistent needs receive timely, evidence-based interventions across local authorities.

The department has carefully assessed the impact of our proposals, and this is included in our published equalities impact and child’s rights impact assessments.

Under our proposed reforms, education, health and care (EHC) plans will continue to exist, but we want to shift to earlier identification of need without bureaucratic assessments and long waiting times to ensure children and young people receive the right support more quickly and easily. We are providing funding for every school to deliver a strong inclusive universal offer for every child and investing £1.8 billion in our new Experts at Hand offer providing targeted health and expert education interventions from professionals such as speech and language therapists or educational psychologists. Experts at Hand will be developed by local area partnerships tailored to local needs and integrated with other local services.

Educational provision in reformed EHC plans will be underpinned by evidence-based specialist provision packages setting out the breadth of education, health and care support children may need. Specialist provision packages and our new National Inclusion Standards will be developed by independent expert panel and tested with parents and families.