EHCP Draft!

[envy4]

Any advice would be great right now! So we finally got our sons EHCP draft after fighting for a year! But not so sure if it's a good one. What should a good EHCP draft contain?

Have a look at paragraph 9.69 of the Code of Practice.

Section B should contain a reasonably detailed and complete description of your son's difficulties so that people working with him know what to expect. It's not good enough, for instance, just to say he has literacy difficulties: if that is the case, it should say whether those are in relation to reading, spelling, writing, comprehension etc, and possibly how far behind his reading/writing etc ages are. If it lists strengths, check whether they really are strengths.

Sections C and D should have quite detailed descriptions of education-related health and social care difficulties.

Section E should have sensible outcomes that reflect the benefit or difference everyone is hoping will be the result of the provision in sections F, G and H. They should be SMART and should cover a range of timescales. They should also ideally relate to each main area of your child's difficulties.

Section F should contain provision to meet each of your child's needs, and that provision must be detailed and specific. Look out for vague wording like "would benefit from", "regular", "as appropriate", "up to", "access to" etc and challenge it. Likewise with support to come from unspecified "adults": if your child needs 1:1 support, the Plan needs to specify that that person is dedicated to your child, i.e. can't be nicked to support others - assuming, of course, that that is what he needs. Programmes should set who is to draw them up and supervise them, and who should deliver them (e.g. TA, teacher etc).

G and H again should be reasonably detailed and specific descriptions of health and social care provision related to education.

I will have been left blank because it is for you to say what your preference is in terms of schools.

I found SOS SEN's booklets really helpful - www.sossen.org/shop/index.php?cPath=22

As PP said look out for vague and woolly terminology like "would benefit from", "access to" and other such crap, because if that is the case, your plan is not worth the paper it is written on.

In a nutshell all your son's needs should be identified in section B and should be taken from all of the reports gathered for the EHC Needs assessment.

For each one of those needs identified there should be provision to address them in Section F, (taken from the recommendations in the reports.)

Eg section B might say "Struggles to focus when in a noisy classroom." In Section F the recommendation might be "X needs a calm quiet environment to learn in."

Similarly Section B might say, " X has poor social skills," and Section F might say " A programme of social skills training delivered for 1 hour each week by a qualified SLT trained and experienced in working with children with autism." (Detailed, specific, and quantifiable)

A good way of ensuring everything is in that should be, is to go through each report with 2 different coloured highlighters. Highlight all the needs in one colour and all the provision in another colour, then check they are all in sections B and F of the Plan.

Useful info here:

www.ipsea.org.uk/what-an-ehc-plan-contains

www.ipsea.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=afd8d11f-5f75-44e0-8f90-e2e7385e55f0

Are you on good terms with his school. We showed the draft to ds's school and asked (a) Could they implement it and (b) Would it make a difference. The feedback was very useful if negative! The SEN team were not impressed that we had done this although it seemed a very logical thing for us to do.