Kent schools go back on Tuesday 1 September. If your child’s Education, Health and Care Plan names no setting, or names one that says it cannot meet their needs, here is where you stand and where to get free, independent help.
Kent’s schools return on Tuesday 1 September, and for most families the new term is a matter of new shoes and a fresh timetable. For some families of children with special educational needs, it arrives with a harder question: what happens when nobody can tell you which school your child is going to.
Every child and young person with an Education, Health and Care Plan, usually shortened to EHCP, should have a school, college or other setting written into Section I of that plan. Where that section is blank, or where the setting named in it has said it cannot meet the child’s needs, families are left in an anxious position at exactly the point in the year when the phones stop being answered.
This is what the law requires, what to do first, and who will help you for nothing.
What the council must do
An EHCP is a legal document, not a statement of intent. Under section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014, the local authority must secure the special educational provision set out in Section F of the plan. That duty sits with the council, and it does not pause because a placement has not been arranged or because a dispute is running.
Section I of the plan is where the actual setting is named. The two sections are meant to fit together: the school or college named in Section I should be one that can deliver everything Section F says the child needs. Where families and councils fall out, it is very often because those two sections have come apart.
If no setting is named, or the named setting cannot take your child
Put it in writing, and do it now rather than in the second week of term. Email the council’s SEN team, state plainly that your child has no placement they are able to attend, and ask what interim provision is being arranged and when. Ask for a written answer, and keep everything.
If a school or college has told you it cannot meet your child’s needs, ask for that in writing from the setting itself rather than relying on a conversation with a member of staff. A council consults settings formally before naming them, and the response the setting sent to the council is the document that carries weight.
Your right to appeal
You can appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, known as the SEND Tribunal, about the setting named in Section I, about the fact that no setting has been named, and about the description of needs and provision in Sections B and F.
The time limit matters. An appeal must generally be lodged within two months of the council’s decision letter or the final amended plan, or within one month of a mediation certificate, whichever is later. Miss it and you may lose the right altogether.
Ordinarily you must contact a mediation adviser before you can appeal. There is an exception: if your appeal is only about the setting named in Section I, or about the fact that none is named, you can go straight to the Tribunal without a mediation certificate.
If the council has changed the setting named in your child’s plan and you intend to appeal, take advice quickly about what provision must continue while that appeal is outstanding. It is a genuinely technical question, the answer turns on the detail of your case, and it is worth an expert five minutes rather than an assumption.
Young people aged 16 to 25
EHCPs do not stop at eighteen. A plan can be maintained until a young person’s twenty-fifth birthday where they remain in education or training, and the same appeal rights apply to a college placement as to a school one.
One thing changes, and it catches families out. From the end of the academic year in which a young person turns 16, the rights under the plan transfer from the parents to the young person themselves. Where a young person does not have the mental capacity to make those decisions, an alternative person, usually a parent, exercises the rights on their behalf. If you are the parent of a young adult with an EHCP, it is worth establishing which of those two positions applies to your family before a dispute starts, because it determines who the council must deal with.
Where to get free independent advice
None of the following will charge you.
- IPSEA, the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice, runs free legally based advice lines and detailed guidance on appealing the setting named in a plan.
- Information, Advice and Support Kent, known as IASK, is the statutory information and advice service for families in the Kent County Council area.
- Medway Council’s SEND information and advice service covers families in the Medway towns, which sit outside KCC’s area.
- SOS!SEN runs a free helpline and advice sessions.
- Council for Disabled Children publishes plain-English guides to the system.
What happens next in Kent
Kent’s SEND services have just been examined. Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission notified Kent County Council of a local area SEND inspection on 22 June, and inspectors were based at Sessions House in Maidstone from 6 to 10 July. The inspection has finished, but the report has not yet been published, and the council has said it has asked Ofsted when to expect it.
KCC has also said that this is the first year in which every pupil moving up to secondary school received their updated EHCP by the statutory deadline.
Kent Local News will report on the inspection findings when they are published.