Where the Cost of Delay Lands
The cost a council can count, and the cost it can't
This week the BBC reported that delays in issuing EHCPs in Cambridgeshire meant the county's mainstream schools missed out on an estimated £7.3m in a single year. Once a plan is finalised, the school receives top-up funding for that child; when a plan is late, the school receives nothing for the months of waiting, and that money is never backdated.
Put simply, every week a plan runs late is a week the council doesn't pay. The child's needs don’t just disappear during that time - meaning that either someone is meeting them, or trying to, or they're going unmet.
The report counts the part of that cost that a council can measure. My day to day casework shows me where the rest of it goes - some of it lands on schools, some on families, and some on the tutors and providers who are working with a child while they wait to be paid.
I've written this piece for families and for schools alike, because so often the two end up frustrated with each other over problems neither of them created, and I think it helps to look at where those problems actually start, and why each side sees them the way it does.
"An EHCP isn't a magic wand"
Many parents will have heard some version of this from a school: an EHCP isn't a golden ticket, it won't necessarily change anything, or there's no point applying because they won't get one anyway.
It's easy to see why families can hear this as a brush-off, or wonder whether the school has its own reasons for not wanting a plan, and sometimes there may well be other things going on. But in my experience, when a SENCo or teacher says this, they are usually describing honestly what they have seen happen, again and again, which in itself tells us something important about just how widespread the problems with council case handling have become.
There are a few things schools in particular tend to have seen.
Plans that arrive late, with no money for the wait. This is the Cambridgeshire situation, and a school that has funded support for months while a plan was delayed, without ever seeing that money come back, will understandably be cautious about what a plan is going to deliver.
Plans that are too vague to use. The SEND Code of Practice is clear about how a plan should be written. Section B should describe all of a child's needs in enough detail to understand how they actually play out for that child day to day - socially, emotionally, sensorily and physically, as well as academically - and Section F should then set out provision for every one of those needs, in a way that is detailed, specific and normally quantified: who will do what, when, how, and how often.
When a plan instead says a child will have "access to" support, or "regular opportunities" for something, nobody can really tell what that means in practice. A school can't work out what the provision costs, so it can't show what funding it needs; and if the provision was never clear in the first place, nobody can show that it isn't being delivered, so it can't be enforced either. Most of my work now is reviewing and redrafting plans like these - going back through all the evidence and setting out the child's needs and provision properly - which is work the council should have done to begin with.
Assessment requests refused when the legal test is met. The legal test for an EHC needs assessment is deliberately low: the council must assess where a child has or may have special educational needs, and may need provision to be made through a plan. Schools regularly see requests turned down where that test simply hasn't been properly applied, so when a school says "there's no point applying", it rarely means they think the child doesn't need support, or even that the child shouldn't have a plan; more often, they've simply watched too many requests like this one get refused.
When home and school see different children
There's another part of this that is much harder to resolve - many children mask at school, putting enormous effort into holding things together all day, so that on the surface they appear "fine", and then everything they've been holding comes out once they're home and feel safe enough to let it.
For families, this can be one of the most painful parts of the whole process. A parent describes what they're seeing at home - the exhaustion, the distress, the shutdowns or meltdowns, the struggle to get through the door in the morning - and is met with a sense, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, that they must be exaggerating, because that isn't the child the school sees. Over time, many parents start to doubt their own account of their child, or feel they have to prove it again and again before anyone will take it seriously.
For schools, the difficulty is real too, because staff can only judge what is in front of them, and a child who is masking well can look settled in class.
"Listen to families" is a vital part of the answer, but on its own it isn't enough. Plenty of school staff do understand masking and take what parents tell them seriously, and plenty still don't. This is exactly the gap that proper, holistic assessment exists to close, which is one reason why it is so important that assessments aren't refused on the basis of how a child presents at school alone.
So when a school says an EHCP isn't a magic wand, and a family hears that as the school not being on their side, both are often responding honestly to what they have lived through; the problem sits with a system that keeps producing these experiences for both of them.
What this means for families: if your school seems unsure about a plan, it can help to ask what they've seen go wrong before, you may find you agree about the problem, and that you're both trying to avoid the same thing.
What this means for schools: a well-written plan, delivered on time, should give you something clear, funded and enforceable to work with, and when plans fall short of that, the council has fallen short of the law, which you're entitled to say.
Where the cost of delay lands
When a council is slow to meet its duties, the cost doesn't disappear, it just moves to whoever happens to be closest to the child.
When there is a school. Many schools put support in place straight away while a plan is delayed, funding extra staff, interventions and adjustments out of a budget that was never meant to carry them, and that can only stretch so far. Over time, the pressure can show up as reduced timetables, early collections, or a growing feeling that the child is "too much" for the setting. By that stage, families and schools have often already been through months of difficulty together; I wrote about how that pattern builds in The Quiet Divide, and late or unfunded plans can deepen a divide that is already there.
When there is no school for it to land on. I've worked on numerous cases where a council has finalised a plan naming only a type of setting in Section I - "mainstream" or "specialist" - while it carries on looking for an actual school, and where the child has remained on roll at a school they can't attend. Because that school isn't named, it can't access the plan's funding, and is often left feeling there's very little it can do; meanwhile, in too many of these cases, no interim education has been arranged at all, sometimes for many months.
The law is clear about who holds the duty here. Under section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014, the council must secure the provision in Section F from the day the plan is finalised, whether or not a school has been named; and if a child can't attend school, section 19 of the Education Act 1996 also requires the council to arrange suitable education in the meantime. Where families ask for EOTAS, the test in section 61 asks whether it would be inappropriate for the provision to be made in a school - a question about the child and their needs, which is quite separate from how many schools the council has consulted, or how many have said no.
When EOTAS is agreed but not paid for. I also see many cases where EOTAS has been agreed and written into the plan, but providers then wait weeks or months for the council to settle their invoices. Parents end up chasing alongside the provider, worried the support their child finally has might stop, and providers, many of them small organisations or sole traders, can't keep working for free indefinitely. Section 42 applies to EOTAS provision just as it does to a school place, and paying the people who deliver it is part of securing it.
Who can absorb the cost, and who can't
When the cost of delay moves onto families, some can carry it for a while, and some can't carry it at all.
Some parents manage to pay for a tutor or therapy while they wait, often only just, with help from family or friends, or by taking out loans and some are able to cut their working hours to chase emails, attend meetings and pull together evidence, or find the energy and information to make a complaint, go to mediation or bring an appeal. Many families can't do any of these things, and it is their children who tend to wait longest, go without for longest and fall furthest behind; every delay a council allows ends up hitting hardest the children who already have the least.
I say this carefully, because I don't want to set families against one another- every family I work with is doing what they can for their child, but so much of the media coverage paints a picture of privileged parents gaming the system for support their children don't really need, and I think the most honest answer to that picture is to show who it leaves out entirely: the children whose families don't have the time, money or energy to keep pushing, and who are quietly left without the support the law says they should have.
Why the law still matters, even when it isn't followed
After years of this, many families and many schools are deeply disillusioned, and I often hear people say the current law is meaningless because councils don't follow it anyway, so why would it matter if the government changed it, or removed parts of it altogether?
I understand that feeling completely. The lack of accountability when councils fail to meet their duties is a huge problem, and using the routes for redress can be exhausting and painfully slow; but those routes still exist, and they still work. Week after week I see children get the right support because a family was able to point to a legal duty and hold a council to it, and without those protections, many more children would fall through completely, with nothing to point to and nowhere left to turn.
That is why the reforms concern me so much. A great deal of what makes a plan usable today, for schools and families alike, is the requirement that Section F is specific, quantified and enforceable. Under the current proposals, a plan would record a "package" of support, while the detail of what a child actually receives would sit in an individual support plan, and it isn't yet clear whether that would be legally enforceable at all, or, if it were, whether the duty would fall on schools rather than councils.
That would take the very things that make provision clear, costed and enforceable out of the plan, and risk moving responsibility onto schools that are already stretched - pushing schools and families even further apart, at exactly the point they most need to be working together.
The current system is failing far too many children, and what it needs is for councils to be held properly to account for the duties they already have, with protections for children kept in place and clarity for everyone involved.
What schools, families and providers can do
The law hasn't changed yet, and every duty in this piece applies today, whatever a council's backlog or budget.
For families
Put concerns in writing to the council, emailing the SEN team and copying in the Director of Children's Services, setting out what is late or not being delivered, which duty applies, and what you're asking for and by when.
Ask about interim education if your child is out of school, by asking the council in writing how it is meeting its section 19 duty right now.
Challenge a vague plan if Section F doesn't say clearly who will do what, when and how often, you can ask for it to be made specific at annual review, or challenge it through mediation or appeal.
Use the complaints route for delay, since late assessments, late plans and undelivered provision can all go through the council's complaints process, and then on to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.
Keep a simple record of dates, emails, missed sessions, unpaid invoices and days out of education; it doesn't need to be neat, it just needs to exist.
For schools
Expect a clear, specific Section F, and say so in your response to the council when a draft plan is vague, you know better than anyone what you'd need in order to actually deliver it.
Record what you fund while you wait, keeping a note of the cost of any provision you put in place ahead of a plan, as that evidence matters both for individual children and for the wider picture.
Back families' requests when the legal test is met, because your evidence carries real weight, especially for children who mask in school, where it can make all the difference to a family being believed.
For providers
Keep clear records of invoices and payment dates, and raise late payment with the council in writing, as delays that put a child's provision at risk are a failure of the council's section 42 duty.
Keep families informed early if late payment is putting sessions at risk, so that it can be challenged together before the support stops.
Keeping somewhere to turn
All of these routes - complaints, the Ombudsman, mediation, appeals and legal challenge - depend on children having clear, enforceable rights in the first place. If the reforms weaken those rights, families and schools lose the very things they rely on when it all goes wrong.
So alongside challenging what's happening now, please tell your MP that what the system needs is better accountability for councils, with children's rights kept firmly in place. My free MP letter builder will help you write a letter in your own words, whether you're a parent, a school leader, a SENCo, a teacher or a provider - and please ask the people around you to write too, because MPs need to hear from schools and families together, describing the same problem from both sides.
My free Canary SEND toolkits on Section 19 alternative provision and EOTAS also go into more detail on the routes above.
