The Department for Education is considering whether education, health and care plans (EHCPs) are the “right vehicle” as it reforms the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system, a senior adviser has said.

EHCPs were introduced as part of wider SEND reforms in 2014 and replaced Statements of SEN.

Dame Christine Lenehan, the DfE’s strategic adviser on SEND, told Tes: “We are considering whether EHCPS are the right vehicle to go forward. They were introduced in 2014; is this the right system for supporting children’s needs?”

She spoke to Tes following a panel discussion on SEND at the Schools and Academies Show.

Dame Christine, who was appointed as strategic adviser to the department last year, told the panel that reforms from the government will be coming soon and would involve a major consultation.

She also told today’s event that the new reforms would be about changing “the bureaucratic nightmare we seem to have got ourselves into, which is actually unhelpful and doesn’t deliver the outcomes for children that we want”.

EHCP system

Dame Christine told the event that the current EHCP system was not fit for purpose.

She added: “It started off in 2014 as a system for a very small group of children, children who actively needed the engagement of health, care and education in order to meet their outcomes.”

Dame Christine said the system has “expanded and expanded” and suggested that most pupils with an EHCP in place “don’t need health and care, they need a really good, focused education”.

“We need to really think about that because local authorities…are spending huge amounts of money to develop plans that schools then can’t implement and that make no sense to anyone,” she said.

Parents ‘caught in the middle’

She told the panel that the relationship with parents needed to be reset.

“Part of what we are looking at here is a system that is financially bankrupt, but also a system that does not deliver the best outcomes for children, and parents are caught in the middle of it,” she said.

Heather Sandy, chair of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ Education Policy Committee, suggested decisions about support for pupils should be made at school level.

Ms Sandy, who is executive director of children’s services at Lincolnshire County Council and a member of the DfE’s advisory group on inclusion, said: “I don’t believe it is right that as a local authority I am responsible for writing a plan for the education of a child I’ve never met to be delivered in a school I have never worked by people whose skills I don’t know.

“I think we need to wonder why we’ve got all that resource and capacity sat at a local authority level and not sat within schools.”

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