Every child with special needs is entitled to a bespoke plan for his or her care, carefully compiled by education, health and social care professionals in partnership with the child’s parents.
However my recent research has shown that the vast majority of Education Health and Care (EHC) plans are badly put together, include vague and unworkable descriptions of needs, lack access to children’s voices and reflect a fragmented approach to SEND between sectors. Unsurprisingly, poor quality plans are likely to lead to questionable provision for the child.
To address these problems, Dr Olympia Palikara, my co-researcher at the University of Warwick, and I have developed a bank of resources for practitioners working with SEND children.
The resources include videos, short presentations and printed guides, which seek to improve descriptions of needs and provision outlines, and can be shared with everyone involved in writing Education Health and Care (EHC) plans. The resources are the result of our four years research into EHC plans, with funding from both the British Academy and the Froebel Trust.
We examined the content of more than 200 EHC plans in England and discovered that the results are worse for deprived local authorities than for the most affluent ones, and worse for mainstream schools than for special schools. Our conclusion was that the EHC plans are often seen as merely a ‘passport’ to accessing care, rather than an informed plan tailored to the needs of an individual child.
We’re now looking to introduce these resources to as many SEN professionals as possible, so we’re running a series of free workshops between January and March 2020 for professionals across England who work with young children with SEND.
Participants will learn how to enable cross-professional collaboration and develop higher quality statements about the children they work with, leading to better care plans. The workshops will be run in partnership with the National Day Nursery Association and with the Early Year Alliance, and will be held in London, Huddersfield, Birmingham and Liverpool.
More information
To book for London workshops at the Early Years Alliance on the 25 February or the 26 March https://crossdisciplinaryinclusion.eventbrite.co.uk
To book for Liverpool (16th January), Birmingham (29th January) and Huddersfield (26th February) contact the National Day Nursery Association at bookings@ndna.org.uk
Contact the research team at www.educationhealthandcare.com