Are EHCPs really driving the SEND crisis?

Recent debates about the scale of the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) “crisis” in England’s schools have often centred around a key legal document: education, health and care plans (EHCPs).

Introduced in 2014, EHCPs were designed to guarantee support for those whose needs exceed what mainstream educational settings ordinarily provide. They replaced the previous system of Statement of SEN, giving families explicit legal rights and local authorities specific duties.

However, the government has questioned whether EHCPs are the “right vehicle” to ensure that the needs of all pupils are effectively met - and suggested that alternative approaches should be considered.

This has been sparked considerable pushback from parents, who worry that removing EHCPs may water down support for vulnerable families.

Schools, meanwhile, are caught in the middle, awaiting the now-delayed White Paper that will set out the government’s SEND reforms.

While school leaders recognise the complexity of the decisions that the government is facing, many fear that if they are left to resolve support needs without a statutory framework that is trusted by parents and teachers, this will only increase the pressure on schools, rather than reducing it.

So, how have EHCPs become so controversial? More importantly, if legislation is changed, how will children’s rights be protected, and how can schools be supported to continue to meet their needs?

To begin to answer those questions, we need to understand why EHCP numbers have grown and what the options are for securing better outcomes through reform.

Why have EHCPs grown in importance?

There are many interlinked reasons for EHCPs being the focus of so much fierce debate, starting with the fundamental problem of shrinking budgets.

Over the past 15 years, education funding in England has declined in real terms on a per-pupil basis, while the cost of providing specialist support has outpaced general inflation. Current spend per pupil is at similar levels to that in 2010.

Broadly, funding for universal and early intervention provision has diminished, and schools have lost the capacity to meet additional needs without relying on statutory plans.

For many schools, securing an EHCP has become the only viable route to access the necessary additional funding and specialist services for children with significant needs.

In parallel, local authority budgets and their education resources - such as specialist teachers, educational psychologists and speech and language therapists - have been cut. This has led to many councils routinely attempting to minimise and delay their responsibilities for SEND and to point the finger at “out of control” EHCPs.

But rather than blame EHCPs out of existence, we need to examine the full context of the increasing demand. There are five key points to consider here:

1. The overall number of pupils with SEND has not changed

Contrary to headlines about SEND doubling since 2010, the overall percentage of children with SEND has not dramatically risen. What has gone up is the proportion of those children designated as needing an EHCP for support.

To clarify, approximately 19.5 per cent of pupils were identified as having SEND (including those with an EHCP) in January 2025. This is proportionally below levels seen at the start of the austerity period in 2010, when 20.9 per cent of pupils were identified as having SEND, including a Statement of SEN.

In effect, the apparent “explosion” in SEND is really a marked increase in those requiring more significant support - and as routes to funding provision have narrowed, EHCPs have become the only way to get funding for meeting those needs.

2. Policy and practice have made EHCPs more visible

A significant point that rarely gets acknowledged is that the SEND reforms of 2014 extended eligibility for statutory support up to age 25, when, previously, eligibility ended at age 16.

This resulted in far greater numbers of young people being eligible for support. Today, 13.8 per cent of EHCPs are held by students in post-16 and further education colleges.

At the same time, increased awareness of neurodevelopmental conditions and broader diagnostic criteria, especially for autism and social, emotional and mental health needs (SEMH), have contributed to rising identification. This is not dissimilar to other areas of medicine. For example, certain cancer and mental health diagnoses have also “doubled” in recent years.

It’s also worth pointing out that more teachers are now being trained in recognising support needs, and there is evidence that those needs are being spotted earlier. For example, Education Policy Institute research has found that the early years foundation stage profile assessments have been able to highlight early indicators of SEND at age 5.

The “radar” for pinpointing children who have barriers to learning has therefore become more effective, although the wider system for meeting their needs has not kept pace.

The data around EHCPs is further complicated by the fact that, in 2014, the SEND Code of Practice removed “school action” and “school action plus” as categories of support within ordinarily available provision in schools.

This led to many pupils disappearing from SEND registers, effectively reducing the “baseline” for EHCPs when they were first introduced.

Critically, the removal of school action did not lead to the rapid improvements in universal provision that the code intended. Instead, it left schools and families turning to EHCPs as the only means of securing support.

3. There is a clash between accountability and parental advocacy

As more parents and professionals come to better understand statutory entitlements, the demand for EHCPs has grown. However, local authorities (which issue EHCPs) have become increasingly under-resourced and deskilled as a result of funding cuts.

They have been forced to resort to a defensive approach to high-needs expenditure and now contest most EHCP applications as a matter of course.

There is limited scope for parents and schools to push back against this, due to the fact that health and social care providers (such as educational psychologists, neuropsychologists and social workers) are too stretched to provide the contributions needed for timely EHCP processes.

Once an EHCP is granted, though, the legal protections enshrined within it give families the ability to challenge under-delivery and local authority reluctance - a fact that only increases focus on the statutory system.

4. The pandemic effect over time

The pandemic saw a pause in statutory assessment, and this caused a bottleneck that is still being felt today. The particularly rapid growth we have seen in EHCPs is, to some extent, simply the system catching up, with children now having been reassessed and reassigned to the appropriate level of support.

There is also evidence that while levels of anxiety and SEMH (which are recognised barriers to learning) were already on the rise in children and young people before the pandemic, national lockdowns accelerated this, adding to that initial bottleneck.

5. The bureaucratic effect over time

Alongside this, SEND caseworkers (who manage the administrative side of EHCP assessment and coordinate the required support) face a perfect storm of bureaucracy.

Rising demand for EHCPs has led to high caseloads and little time for personalised planning. The quality of EHCPs is therefore often poor, as they are being produced by people who don’t know the child well.

On top of this, the system experiences significant delays that prevent timely intervention and lead to poor decision making, resulting in appeals.

The legal route for securing support, which was originally intended as a last resort for parents to ensure provision is effective, has now become a standard part of the process.

In 98 per cent of tribunal cases, the decision goes against the local authority.

How is this affecting schools?

The consequences of all of this are wide-reaching. It’s fair to say that the narrowing of what counts as “ordinarily available” support has fundamentally reordered the SEND system.

As mentioned above, mainstream schools, constrained by stretched budgets and various policy demands, find they cannot provide for higher needs children without the leverage an EHCP brings.

That is not to deny the widespread great work and examples of excellent inclusive practice in schools across the country, as evidenced by ImpactEd’s Inclusion in Practice project.

However, these excellent practices are not endemic, and the fundamental conflict between high-stakes academic attainment targets and supporting those who learn differently has often led to difficult outcomes.

Most children identified with SEND remain on SEN Support (around 73 per cent in 2025). In theory, they should be supported by delegated mainstream budgets, yet these budgets have not kept pace with need. As a result, many families now view EHCPs as the only route to secure adequate and legally binding provision.

But EHCPs are far from perfect. While they provide legal protections and visibility for the most complex cases, they do not guarantee positive academic or wellbeing outcomes across the system.

Instead, their proliferation has drawn attention to the failings of under-resourced universal provision, while increasing pressure on schools and placing further stress on local authority budgets.

What would a better system look like?

Finding a way out of this isn’t easy. If the government were to simply redefine thresholds for EHCPs in the upcoming White Paper, it would risk the exact same issue recurring: pupils will temporarily “disappear” from SEND registers, only for the system to once again have to catch up as parents are forced to battle for access to the right support.

To avoid this scenario, it will take significant investment and training to ensure that universal provision is able to support the needs of all pupils without an EHCP, in advance of threshold changes.

Ultimately, a system less reliant on statutory plans would have to do the following:

• Provide effective, adequately funded universal support so that most needs can be met without a legal plan. Planning and targeted provision would still be required for some, but this should only be in exceptional cases.
• Reserve statutory plans for those with severe and complex needs, who require multi-agency support. These plans should not be a proxy for access to basic resources.
• Offer straightforward, fair and prompt access to support, with transparency and strong accountability mechanisms across education, health and social care.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has suggested that double the current funding would be needed to fix the system. But what else would be needed for truly effective reform?

Funding reform

It’s not just about getting more money into schools; it’s about changing how that money is allocated. We need to review national funding formulae, particularly the high-needs formula distribution methodology, to place funding according to a “throughput” model. This allocates funding based on the functions or services to be provided, rather than relying on pupil-centric allocation (which should only be required in exceptional cases).

In the longer term, we must increase and ring-fence core funding for universal provision to reduce incentives to escalate to EHCPs, and review and update the high-needs formula for fairness and sufficiency.

Develop the architecture of inclusion

Alongside this, there needs to be greater focus on effective inclusion and inclusive pedagogy - and on thinking about how we can build the capacity needed for this in schools.

For instance, teachers and leaders will need significant training to build their confidence and knowledge. We should also consider how we can incentivise collaboration across mainstream and specialist settings.

This will involve addressing workforce shortages, especially in educational psychology and therapies, and investing in training for specialists, as well as for teachers.

At the same time, we need to join the dots with health and social care to enable early intervention and to support transitions throughout school. Early screening by health teams should inform local partnerships through more effective knowledge sharing.

Health and social care enforcement should be strengthened, and this process made less adversarial through training, timely decisions and transparent data integration.

Restore trust in the system

None of this will work if we don’t also restore trust in the system. For this to happen, existing bureaucratic processes must be streamlined.

The government must address local authority staffing shortages and turnover, and focus on building capacity for collaborative, family-centred planning, instead of reactive, legalistic responses.

Local authorities need stronger accountability to review their role in writing and supporting EHCPs, and we should be working to build capacity for schools to write plans themselves, by making these documents shorter, more agile and more reflective of context.

Finally, it must become a fundamental and explicit expectation to ensure that policies are co-designed with parents and families. This must happen across the system and at all levels.

Importance of statutory protection

The real story of EHCPs is not runaway SEND prevalence, but the growing importance of statutory protection in the face of shrinking resources for inclusive mainstream provision.

The experience of the sector during the past decade has shown that children with SEND don’t just disappear through recategorisation.

Taking them out of focus simply builds more remedial costs into society, while schools are still required to identify children’s needs and have a sustainable process for determining what strategies to use to engage them successfully.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has called for “bold reform” on SEND. That is indeed what is needed, but unless reform is focused on investment, accountability and a system-wide embrace of inclusion, EHCPs will remain both essential and overstretched - leaving too many children in legal limbo, when they should be thriving in schools that can meet their needs as a matter of course.

Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders

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