Council warns therapy delays causing incomplete special needs education plans
Buckinghamshire Council has warned that it is having to issue incomplete education plans for children with special needs because of long delays accessing therapists.
Councils issue education, health and care plans (EHCPs) to children with special education needs and disabilities (SEND), which set out what provision the child is legally entitled to.
EHCPs are meant to factor in advice from relevant therapists. But a council report published last week warned that long waits to secure advice from these therapists meant it was having to issue plans in their absence.
‘September 2023 figures identify a 24 week wait for Speech and Language therapy advice to inform new Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP) and a 52 week wait for Occupational Therapy advice (against a 6-week statutory timeframe). This means that children’s EHCPs are issued without all the relevant advice,’ the report said.
‘While this is in line with the SEND Code of Practice, it does mean that the child’s needs are not fully represented within the Plan initially and there is a delay in providing the appropriate therapy support. To rectify this, EHCPs are reopened and updated once the advice is available.’
The report also warned that a nationwide shortage of educational psychologists (EPs) was delaying the issuing of EHCPs. Unlike therapists, input from EPs must be secured before an EHCP is issued – there is no option of issuing an EHCP without their advice and then updating it later. As a result, the council was struggling to meet the 20-week statutory timeframe for issuing EHCPs.
‘Nationally and locally, it has proven increasingly difficult to recruit and retain Educational Psychologists,’ the report said. ‘At the time of writing there are five vacancies in our team of 16.
‘The combination of the increase in workload [from rising demand for EHCPs] and vacancy rate means the EP team is overwhelmed and that we have a significant delay in progressing the statutory assessment process. As a result, the proportion of assessments completed in 20 weeks has fallen from 67% at the time of the last inspection to 49.4% (year to date figure). This figure is likely to be lower by year end, when the national dataset is collected, and to decline further in 2024 unless we can secure a significant increase to Educational Psychologist capacity.’
The report said the council was using agency EPs while trying to recruit more of its own, while extra investment from the local NHS would help recruit more therapists, but only over the long term.
Image: Iñaki del Olmo
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