Over 400 Bristol EHCPs Have No Named Setting In A Process Taking Over A Year

Hundreds of Bristol children with SEND wait over a year for an EHCP

Bristol City Council is taking over a year to finalise Education Health Care Plans (EHCP).

Latest data from the council shows that not only is the process unlawfully lengthy, but that over 400 children and young people do not even have a named setting in their plan.

The EHCP process should not take longer than a year. There are a slim number of reasons that the council is allowed to exceed this. One such example is that a school is closed during the long summer holiday when the request is made.

Section I of an EHCP specifies the name of the education setting that a child or young person will attend when it is finalised.

In the whole of 2025, the council finalised 1,070 EHCPs.

There are currently 428 of these plans with no education setting named in Section I

Of those, 214 just do not currently have a named setting in Section I.

A further 198 plans only have a type of setting named.

And, 16 currently have no data at all in Section I.

The council says of the 198 plans: ‘These are active cases in consultation, where we are working with families and settings to secure a named placement.’

Of the 16, the council says: ‘These figures represent data conflicts, which are made up of a combination of young people who are currently NEET, and cases where updates to data recording are required. Targeted data-quality work is underway to reduce data conflicts and the Section I conflicts are scheduled to be addressed at the next data-conflict focus day.’

When it came to how long Bristol City Council took to finalise EHCPs in 2025, it eventually disclosed the following somewhat confusing data.

Less than 20 weeks – 65
weeks to 10 months – 58
months to 12 months – 599
12 months+ – 231

We have asked for clarity around the way this data has been presented.

What is clear though is that nearly 600 children or young people were waiting up to a year for their EHCP.

Worse than that is that 231 were waiting more than a year.

The council says there are a further 117 plans issued as exception cases. This means they are excluded from the 20 week restriction.

The question was answered by Southville Councillor Christine Townsend, who is the Chair of the Children and Young People Policy Committee.

The answer said: “In 2025, 1,070 EHC plans were finalised. This is a 37 per cent increase on 2024 and the highest number of plans finalised in a year by the City Council.

“While we increased the number of plans finalised in 2025 by boosting team output through additional capacity and productivity improvements, we are now implementing further measures to further accelerate the reduction in average waiting times for families and improve the proportion of EHCNAs completed within the 20-week statutory timeframes.”

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