Education, health and care plans and tribunals in England: A statistical tale from 2019

Abstract

Education, health and care (EHC) plans were introduced in England in 2014, as a replacement for statements of special educational needs. Unexpectedly, the number of children and young people in receipt of an EHC plan rose by 49% during the 5 years up to 2019. Whilst most of the increase has been due to the extension of the age range up to age 25, there has still been a notable rise of 20% in the 0-15-year range. This study explores the trends and variations in EHC plans and tribunals within English local authorities (LAs) for children and young people with special educational needs and disability (SEND) by interrogating the latest full set of data from 2013 to 2018. Two quintile groups (n = 30) are used for comparing LAs with high and low levels of EHC plans and LA case studies are also presented for further inspection of the data. Wide variations across LAs still exist for EHC plans (5.2% to 1.0%) and tribunal appeals (43 to 0 per 10,000). LAs with low EHC plans have more appealable decisions at tribunals and are financed at significantly lower levels than LAs with high EHC plans, largely due to an historic spend factor of 50% in the national funding formula. There are also clear differences between the English regions for both EHC plans and tribunals, with high increases for both in the South East. The implications of the findings are discussed within the framework of LA critical self-reviews, benchmarking, fiscal constraints and inclusion.EHC plans and tribunals in England 2019 575 © 2020 British Educational Research Association . . . more robustly investigate the reasons for local variations and establish the extent to which the variations can reasonably be explained. It should challenge local areas that are outliers in respect of measures such as the proportion of pupils with EHC plans and use of high-cost provision, in order to reduce unnecessary variation, increase confidence in the fairness of the system, identify good practice and promote improvement. (p. 12) PostscriptWhilst this article was undergoing peer review, there were further publications by the Department for Education (DfE, 2019a;, the Ministry of Justice, 2018, 2019) and the House of Commons Education Committee (2019a; 2019b). The number of EHC plans increased by 34,000 (11%) in the previous 12 months and by 49% since EHC plans and tribunals in England 2019 589

Fair funding for pupils with special educational needs and disability in England?

“…These latter correlations illustrate the variations in local SEND policy (see Marsh, 2023;Marsh & Howatson, 2020), already highlighted in the ranges reported in Table 4, whereby LAs which have a practice of reducing the reliance on statutory assessments and controlling the high needs and notional SEND spend have been penalised by the historical spend factor in the NFF. Another point of note in Table 7 is the non-significant correlation between HNB and appeals to the SEND tribunal, which is perhaps counterintuitive, as it might be expected that LAs with a low HNB would have more tribunal appeals.…”