Working with an EHCP Writing Service: The Ultimate Guide

(Part 1)

Working with an EHCP Writing Service: The Ultimate Guide (Part 1)

Every year, Local Authorities (LAs) across England issue thousands of education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for children and young people with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND); in 2022, a total of 66,706 new plans were issued. In order to do this, though, LA SEND teams engage in a process of co-ordinating assessments, writing EHCPs and managing reviews that is fraught with systemic difficulties around capacity, staffing, timescales and quality.

This is why many LAs work with external providers to support the EHCP process, including for staff EHCP training, quality assurance of plans and, of crucial importance, the task of writing the EHC plans.

In Part 1 of this guide, you will find everything you need to know about working with an EHCP writing service, including:

• What EHCP writing services do
• How LA SEND teams manage the EHCP writing process and what challenges they face
• The benefits of commissioning external providers

What is EHCP writing and how is it done?

Writing an EHC plan involves turning multiple professional assessment reports about a child/young person’s identified special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) into a consistent and coherent document. This document needs to:

• address all the areas of need and outline the provision required to meet assessed needs;
• comply with legislation, including the 2015 SEND Code of Practice and Part 3 of the Children and Families Act 2014;
• be holistic, functional and accessible, which means being comprehensive and multi-disciplinary, yet also being concise and understandable to parents, children, young people, providers and practitioners.

The task therefore involves analysing and conveying complex information in a clear and concise manner, and into the format of the Local Authority’s EHCP template. Plan writing is a time-consuming process, often involving working with up to 100 pages of varied information.

EHC plans are written by experienced professionals, either as part of the SEND Case Officer role or by designated plan writers. Some Local Authorities rely on a fixed in-house team to manage the variable plan writing workload (more on the challenges of this in the next section), whilst others work with external plan writing professionals, either to support the team with ‘overspill’ or during peak periods, or to carry out all of the plan writing on an ongoing basis. External plan writers can come in the form of freelance individuals or professional EHCP writing services. The pros and cons of these various support options will be addressed later on in this guide.

The challenges of managing the EHCP writing process

So what difficulties do most LA SEND teams face in terms of managing this EHCP development process?

Volume

One challenge is the sheer volume of work; the number of requests for an EHC Needs Assessment and new EHC plans issued has risen year on year since plans were introduced as part of the 2014 SEND reforms. SEND case officers typically have extremely unmanageable caseloads in the hundreds, which means that the amount of time a case officer has to dedicate to each child/young person works out to be a very limited number of hours per year. This not only impacts on the timeliness of plan development (the proportion of new plans issued within 20 weeks was just 49.2% in 2022) but also on how much time case officers have left to dedicate to directly supporting and liaising with the family and involved professionals i.e. the casework element of their role.

Fluctuations

Another challenge is how plan writing workloads can fluctuate quite unpredictably, which is difficult to manage internally – particularly when dealing with very tight timescales – and a case officer can suddenly become swamped if several plans become ready for drafting simultaneously.

Staff

High and unpredictable workloads create challenges in retaining staff. In the face of ever-increasing pressures on case officers to deal with growing caseloads and manage a role that has become more complex over the years (with no corresponding professional recognition or standardised training), staff retention issues are widespread. Having to constantly recruit and train new staff members is a massive drain on LA SEND services and has a knock-on effect on the timeliness of EHCP development, particularly where case officers are responsible for drafting all of the plans for their caseload, rather than having separate dedicated plan writing support for this aspect of the role.

Quality and consistency

A final challenge of the EHCP writing process is maintaining high quality and consistency across all plans, due to the above issues around high staff turnover, lack of consistent training in plan writing best practice, and unmanageable caseloads. The quality and consistency of EHCPs is a common weakness highlighted on Local Area SEND inspections, and where issues mean that key statutory requirements for plans are not met, this can lead to appeals to the SEND Tribunal (which have also been on the increase over the last few years).

Why work with an EHCP writing service?

In the context of these difficulties around capacity, staffing, timescales and quality, many LAs look to alternative ways to manage the task of writing EHC plans. As mentioned previously, different types of external plan writing support can be sought to assist in-house teams, but these come with their own problems.

Whilst it may be tempting to rely on temporary staff (either freelance individuals or agency temps) to plug any gaps, this often comes at the expense of quality and consistency due to lack of experience and/or training. New ‘digital solutions’ are also often touted as the answer to the labour-intensive plan writing process, but in reality the task is a human one, and the novelty of new technology cannot better an experienced, trained professional putting together a child or young person’s plan with care and consideration of the many nuances involved, problem-solving based on the evidence and their knowledge and experience, and signposting where further information is required before the plan moves past the draft stage.

So where does this leave struggling LA SEND teams with backlogs of plans to draft and 20-week deadlines to meet? This is where external EHCP writing services come in. There are multiple benefits to partnering with a plan writing service, including:

An extended team

Working with a dedicated EHCP writing service is the equivalent of having an extended team of fully trained writers that require no management or employment costs, whilst also often being able to scale workloads up and down as and when required.

Cost-efficiency

Outsourcing the plan writing aspect of the EHCP assessment and development process is more cost-effective than hiring, training and managing new staff members.

Improved case management

Having external plan writers in place means that in-house case officers can focus on their case management responsibilities. Families want to experience timely communication from their case officer, to feel listened to and supported, and to be able to work together. However, when case officers are required to dedicate a significant proportion of their time to drafting EHC plans, this takes them away from being able to efficiently manage the whole process and directly support families and schools throughout.

Plan writing expertise

The sole focus of specialist plan writers is ensuring quality and consistency, so partnering with an external plan writing service is about more than just getting the work done; a good organisation will have extensive experience and be able to utilise knowledge about national variations and best practice to inform the delivery of their plan writing service.

Coming up next

Click here to read Part 2 of this guide to working with an EHCP writing service, which will cover the following:

• What to look for when sourcing EHCP writing support
• How to integrate external support with in-house staff for maximum success