Rutland County Council missing educational healthcare plan (EHCP) targets in its schools

A council is repeatedly missing statutory targets for support plans for special needs pupils.

Rutland County Council’s latest performance report says the amount of Education Health and Care Plans (EHCP) issued within the statutory 20-week timescale are ‘significantly below target’, with less than a fifth (17 per cent) of plans delivered within the timescale since January.

EHCPs set out what support a child will need while in education as well as the extra funding granted to provide that support.

The authority has seen a sharp drop in performance. Last year 65 per cent of plans were delivered on time. The time delays have been put down to not having enough staff to do the work, as well as an increase in the number of plans.

A report to the area’s School’s Forum in May said the numbers of children in Rutland with an EHCP plan had risen to 342, a 42 per cent increase since 2019. The majority of those with an EHCP were schooled in mainstream education (113 children), with 63 children in special education needs units.

The council’s performance report says: “The main reasons for this performance are staff capacity and case volumes owing to increases in demand, those falling into the exemption period during school holiday periods when assessments cannot take place, delays in responses to consultations from schools and delays in advice from educational psychologists.”

In order to try to improve the time it is taking to issue the plans the authority will name a type of school, rather than a name of school on the plan, as this had been causing delays.

The report says: “Additional educational psychologist resources have been secured to help improve assessment turnaround times and the service intends to name the type of school in EHCPs, rather than a specific school, where delays to school consults are experienced which will help to improve this performance on timescales.”

The authority is overspending on its high needs budget, which is a specialist pot, within the overall school’s budget. In the most recent financial year it spent £1.6m extra on top of its £5.34m high needs budget and is expecting to overspend again this year.

The authority is now one of 55 which are part of the government’s delivering better value programme, which aims to help councils' SEN departments to become financially sustainable and also to reduce demand for EHCPs.

The growing number of children needing EHCPs has been seen across the country. Figures recently released by the Department for Education said there had been 84,000 EHCP plans issued nationally last year, a rise of 26 per cent in 2022. Now, almost one in 19 children in education has an EHCP.