Bristol EHCP Delays Sees Just 3 Per Cent Of Plans Issued On Time

Education officers tell councillors that delays are “going to take a period of time to work through”

Delays to the process of applying for Education Health Care Plans (EHCPs) from Bristol City Council, has increased so much that it has only managed to finalise 3 per cent of plans on time so far this year.

The legal timeframe for issuing an EHCP from its initial request – called an Education Health Care Needs Assessment (EHCNA) – until the finalisation of the finished plan is 20 weeks.

But currently, the current average wait time for families has increased to 49.3 weeks.

The data comes from a paper to Children and Young People Policy Committee, which took place at the council house last week.

Bristol resident, Sally Kent, asked in public forum how many EHCPs exceeded 52 weeks?

Bristol City Council did not provide an answer to the question.

Public committee papers showed EHCP data taken as a ‘performance snapshop’ on 28 February 2025. On this date, the number of EHCPs finalised in 20 weeks was just 1 per cent. The England average at the same time was 50.3 per cent.

Bristol City Council’s timeliness target is 50 per cent, which would still mean half of its plans were not complete within the legal time limit.

For the entire year of 2024, just 17 per cent of plans were finalised on time.

Papers showed that there had been a decrease in the number of EHCNAs received in February compared to data for the same time last year. But, as to be explained by the Director of Education and Skills Vik Verma, cuts to non-statutory top up funding had caused significant issues.

Bristol City Council’s year to date timeliness for 2025 was just 3 per cent.

What was said in the meeting about EHCPs

The issues around timeliness were discussed by education officers at the committee meeting, with councillors asking questions surrounding the data in the papers.

Executive Director of the Children and Education, Hannah Woodhouse started with an overall update. When covering EHCPs, she said: “I wanted to go first of all to the data in this paper on EHCPs which has already been referred to and really to reflect again, as we have a number of times before, recognising the scale of the number of EHCPs sitting waiting for assessment in the service.

“So at the moment we have had a slight reduction in new assessments as reported here in the February data – 116 in that month – which is down by 24.

“Overall we have 1,255 EHCPs waiting assessment. Which means – and we finalized 78 in that month – although in the following in the subsequent month that has risen a bit. And I suppose I wanted to recognise again that this is a situation, which has already been highlighted, is of considerable concern obviously to all of us. Particularly to parents to those young people who are waiting for those assessments and and we really recognize that the urgency, the need to make as much progress as we possibly can and to support parents to wait and to support in anticipation of that assessment.

“As we know as we’ve said before it is down to a number of factors. Some of them are national, but some of them also local – removal of our top-up funding, non-statutory funding – meant that there were a number of additional requests for assessment. And as we already have reported – and is in the papers – we have run a number of restructure and recruitment approaches – including in EPS and in the service and in the management – additional management in the service. And we’ve extended Vic [Verma] has talked before here about we’ve extended the top up period. So children should have continue to have provision while they’re waiting for their assessment .

“I just wanted to recognise that obviously the 20 week data is is extremely, is still obviously very, very low and the average weeks – 49 weeks reported in the papers here – is our is our top priority. We’ve been spending a lot of time this week looking at our modeling. So how can we support more plans to be assessed and very much wanting to support the team who are working as hard as they can to do that over time. So you know, wanted to recognise it’s a significant concern, it’s a significant priority, you’ve heard the level of anxiety about this in the city and young people affected by it. And we will continue to support children who are already in receipt of provision in order to recognise that that is the situation.”

After raising concerns about the number of acronyms in the paper without explanation, Labour Councillor for Hartcliffe & Withywood Kerry Bailes asked: “My question is about educational psychologists and recruiting them. Because we’ve been having this conversation for a long time and you know we’ve been – some of us have been here a long time – some of us not so much. But we keep hearing this and we know that you know, the universities aren’t training them. But you know our kids need those assessments and we need quality reports written and quite often they’re not very good. They’re not good quality. Lots of us parents, lots and lots and lots and lots of us have to then go private and it costs us a lot of money and if you’re on benefits you’re not allowed to have that much money in your savings. And there are charities out there that can help you but you have to know about it. You know nobody can help you if you know and it’s it’s not like it’s a closely guarded secret but we want more educational psychologists but we also want really good reports.”

Director of Education and Skills at Bristol City Council, Vik Verma responded saying: “I was going to respond to the educational psychology so in terms of education psychology we’ve got mostly a permanent education psychology workforce. We have recruited into already so we have completed the recruitment and induction is happening now of the additional half a million pounds of investment that we’ve put in this year to support with additional assessments. So you know, they’ll take some time for the effect of that for them to have then got out and met with children and undertaken those assessments. But we should start to see that in our performance data over the next few months. We’ll start to see more assessments being undertaken.

“We’re rapidly getting into July so there will be some lag and then we’ll get into the autumn. But you know, that that investment is there for the whole of this financial year to support that particular area of work. And alongside that, we’re also introducing a new quality assurance tool in terms of fact we have introduced already but a quality assurance tool for all Education Health and Care Plans. That is part of our learning loop and feedback and that extends to advice as well including education educational psychologists but also other advice we get from other professionals as well.”

Green Party councillor for Knowle, Cam Haywood asked: “Following on from that, the average time for EHCPS it’s always in the written bit of the report but I think it’d be helpful if that was in the table of the report just so we can see how that’s changing over time as well. From my memory, it does look to be going up quite significantly. I think it was about 38 weeks maybe six months ago or something. So yeah that’s a concern. And we keep hearing like every meeting that there’s been a restructure – there’s vacancies we’re looking to fill them. You just mentioned there’s been some vacancies filled but like compared to like how many vacancies have been filled and how many more are we looking to fill? How confident are we that filling those vacancies will start to bring that average time down?”

Verma replied: “So the additional assessments are predominantly as a result of what was the withdrawal of the top up funding. Now what we did, and I think I presented at the last committee if not the last one the one before – was the extension of that top up period so that there wasn’t this cliff edge for those children receiving support. So those children and the schools supporting them are receiving on average about £8,000 of provision which is substantial, is probably in the regions of what an Education Health and Care Plan if awarded was, you know, would cover.

“Having spoken to schools, having presented that to schools, broadly they’re confident that provision continuing as a positive thing whilst an Education Health and Care Plan is being produced. But it has been a real challenge for the service in having to absorb, you know, a cohort of nearly a thousand young people who are on, were previously being supported without an Education Health and Care Plan with funding an early intervention funding. Then coming through for a statutory assessment

“So broadly speaking if that cohort hadn’t come through, we would be at fairly typical levels in terms of comparing to our statistical neighbors in the south west and other core cities. So it is not a sustained rise. It’s a one-off rise in terms of that we’ve stabilised that by making sure that there is always that provision for those children whilst we also then work through.

“So some of the investment that we’ve described, the restructure is about additional capacity so the service can support both the assessments. But also when we then get into the .you know, the longer term support for those children as well.But it is a particular challenge and is the reason that average has gone up.”

Haywood asked: ” Thank you for that, that’s really helpful to hear. And just on on the vacancies in terms of educational psychologists, how many more vacancies do we have to fill to get to the level where we’d want to be?

Head of Service – Inclusion, Emma Lloyd said: “So we have filled all the current vacancies that we had identified with the EP service for educational psychology. So we’ve got, we needed a thousand extra hours and that’s what we’ve filled. So we have met that. There is recruitment going on still within the send team itself. We have had the first round of recruitment for one of the teams and that I think is complete or almost complete. And we have got another round for some of the other teams that’s ongoing at the moment. But that should all be completed very soon.”

Green Party Councillor in Lawrence Hill, Shona Jemphrey asked: “My question is also about Education Health Care Plans, because I appreciate what we’re hearing is that it’s a one-off, but as colleagues have mentioned this is a problem that’s been going on for years and years. If I’m understanding the data correctly, even before this bump appeared, we were already below the national average or the English average. So I just wanted to ask a bit more about that and to also ask a bit more detail about the restructure.

“Is it that we are hiring workers on a short-term basis to fill these 1000 hours? Or are they going to stick around? How is this going to look in a year, two years? Because obviously, parents are concerned you know? Many children who need an EHCP, maybe their siblings also need an EHCP, so the parents are going to be thinking about how is this going to play out in the years to come?”

Emma Lloyd responded: “That’s a really good question. For the extra thousand hours of EP time, that is a one-off, one-year project to reduce the number of families and children and young people waiting for advice. The recruitment into the send service itself is permanent. So we are building permanent capacity to help make sure that we can meet the needs of what we’ve got coming in now. But actually future proofing it as well to make sure that we can meet any future EHCP needs requests that come in as well. Once this particular cohort has gone through the system we won’t need as many EP in post as we’ve got for this short period of time if that makes sense? That’s working for that group, that’s extra that’s come in, but the system itself will have more capacity. If that makes sense?”

Jemphrey asked: “What do we expect our statistics to look like in say two years time? Because previously the EHC Plans I think it’s 28 per cent were being completed on time – which obviously isn’t acceptable – so what are we expecting that percentage to be in a couple of years?”

Emma Lloyd responded: “We would anticipate that once we’ve seen this this cohort through, we would be at at least the national average. But obviously our aspirations would be to be above that national average and we would be able to do that within the two years.”

Jemphrey asked: “And that national average is 50.3 per cent. So that would be would that be an improvement on what families have been dealing with for the past 5 -10 years or so in Bristol?”

Emma Lloyd responded: “It would it would. But we would obviously be hoping to to exceed that. Snd obviously we don’t just want to be compliant with the national average. We know we want to make sure that we are giving our children and family the very best start and supporting that journey. So we would obviously be aiming to be higher than that but at least at national average.”

Jemphrey said: “I think national average would be amazing compared to where we are now so yeah that’s a starting point thank you.”

Kerry Bailes asked: “I mentioned the quality of Ed Psych reports but I’m also thinking about the quality of the overall EHCP plan. So if you’re a parent new to the system, you might look at your plan and most of it’s written in language that you might not necessarily understand. Some of some of the words and acronyms are mind-boggling.

“So I’m just thinking about the quality overall because obviously Ed Psych reports and all the reports make-up this this plan. um So we want to make sure that they’re quality controlled. And you know they look amazing and they do what they’re meant to do. So will organisations like the parent carer forum continue to quality assure them? Because we all know we’ve got a really good parent carer forum at the moment and they work really hard. We want to make sure that parents can still go to them and make sure that they have got a good plan.”

Verma replied: “Yeah you’re absolutely right. We have a brilliant parent carer forum. They’ve been very much involved in the development of our quality assurance framework as well as doing the auditing with us. And part of the new grant that we are publishing for them to give them a much more long-term funding commitment for the next few years. Also includes some of their capacity to be able to do that auditing with us. Because the way we’ve approached quality assurance audits – so when I describe the audits of educational psychology advice or any advice that’s part of the the audit of a whole Education Health and Care Plan that’s multi- agency. So the health service supports us with auditing the health parts of those plans. Parent carer reform gives us that support around parent view and then we have our own auditors within our service.

“So it is a proper robust process we’ve undertaken. I think we finished our third round of auditing and then obviously that learning forms part of the work that we do and obviously there’s always learning there’s always opportunities for celebrating good practice within there. But what we have seen is that there’s a consistent view across the moderators that you know, of the quality of plans and that’s been helpful that we’re all on the same page as to what we want to see and when we’re not seeing it you know that feedback’s given. So you know that’s into its third cycle but it’s it’s been a very good collaborative process and that will continue now. Yhat’s not a kind of one-off process that is something that lives with the service.

“When we were just referring to the restructure of the service, part of that was also bringing down case loads so a permanent increase in the staffing. But we also put in place a new role for a practice development send officer which is about that development of practice, about quality supervision. So whilst managers are in the service to support their teams, we’ve also got dedicated professionals within each team supporting around practice as well. So it’s all part of that design of the new send service and was welcomed by the service when we’ve been working with them.”

Kerry Bailes said: “Thank you that’s really helpful. Because obviously I bring it up quite a lot and Jen Smith talked about her legal action about lots and lots of things. So we obviously want to bring we we don’t want parent carers having to spend money on taking the council to court for things that everybody knows that the council isn’t going to win. So we want to keep costs low for us as parents because you know, having a good plan is brilliant and you know, yeah we can’t afford to keep taking the council to court. It’s just not acceptable.”

Verma replied: “No thank you and I think you know we do have a really you know, really passionate team that’s trying to do their best. I think you know we have got an improvement journey ahead of us to get the send service to where it needs to be. That’s part of why we published the new strategy in January which came to this committee as well.

“We’ll talk about some of the capital, you know development and sufficiency as well, so there’s a significant amount of work. There’s a lot of focus from Emma [Lloyd] and her team and myself on this area. But it’s going to take a period of time to work through. Obviously we didn’t anticipate that backlog coming through from top up you know, in terms of that decision. But also you know, developing practice continuing to work relationally with families is something that we’re going to need to really sustain and work hard on.”

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