Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document

Contents

This article is a personal thought-piece by Dr Sharon Smith, based on her work for her PhD in inclusion and personal experiences. It is not an official SNJ position and should not be construed as such

For many families, the EHCP becomes the one solid thing in a system that otherwise wobbles under our feet. It’s the document we cling to because it often feels like the only way, in the current education system, to secure adaptations, therapies, specialist teaching support and reasonable adjustments. Even when provision isn’t delivered, the EHCP provides us with a route of redress. I’ve lived it myself. Until this summer, when my daughter left the education system, I relied on her EHCP to secure the provision she needed and had to utilise complaints systems and the tribunal more than once. It was exhausting.

There has to be a better way!

This article is designed as a conversation starter to shift thinking toward other options than those presented in the SEND reform proposals. I’ll highlight some of the issues with EHCPs for mainstream inclusion and suggest an alternative: an Individual Inclusion Plan.

This might require relinquishing the ‘comfort’ of the EHCP in its current format, in exchange for something that might deliver better inclusion. Please bear with me while I explain some of my thinking.

This article focuses on mainstream education. Many children will always need and thrive in specialist settings, and nothing in this proposal replaces or reduces those options. What I am addressing here is the reality that most children with SEND are educated in mainstream schools, and that the current system does not equip those schools to be genuinely inclusive.

My proposal is not about forcing children into mainstream; it is about ensuring that when families choose mainstream, its environment is capable of meeting their needs without relying on deficit‑based paperwork or adversarial processes. My aim is to prompt thinking differently about how to approach mainstream inclusion for more children.

I am also not arguing that children should lose any rights or that support should be watered down. Rights matter. They protect children. They protect families. They protect access to provision. But my experience as a parent, and also my recent doctoral research, show that EHCPs on their own cannot deliver inclusion. They can secure provision, but they do not secure belonging. They can describe needs, but they do not describe relationships. They can protect entitlements, but they do not protect our children. And the way the system is built places too much responsibility on parents to enforce those rights. Not on schools. Not on local authorities. On us.

The emotional weight of paperwork

To secure an EHCP, we have to describe our child or young person in deficit terms: what they cannot do, what they struggle with, what needs “to be fixed”. Parents in my doctoral research about the inclusion of learners who have Down’s syndrome in mainstream education talked about the discomfort of this process. They described a keen sense of disloyalty in writing about their child as “a problem”. There is a huge disconnect between what this process requires from parents to secure support, and how we talk about our children in our everyday life. And we all also know the risks of sounding too positive, or as though our child actually has some strengths that can benefit their learning, for example, creativity, resilience or an area of talent.

EHCPs also create a particular kind of identity in mainstream schools. Once a child is seen through the lens of a category or a document, it becomes easier for staff to focus on what is written (in deficit terms!) rather than who is present and standing in front of them. Current EHCP processes also provide mainstream schools with an opportunity to say “we cannot meet need” with no recourse or accountability. It is only children who have EHCPs who can be turned away from schools so easily…

Individual rights create individual burden

The strength of EHCPs is that they carry individual rights to provision and support. But individual rights rely on individual enforcement. And this individual enforcement currently relies on parents to do the heavy lifting.

We become the ones who must monitor provision, chase professionals, challenge schools, escalate to the LA, gather evidence and hold the system to account. It is an exhausting, adversarial form of accountability that sits on the shoulders of families, many of whom are already stretched to breaking point.

This dynamic embedded in the accountability system does not create inclusive cultures. It creates defensive ones. It pits parents against schools and local authorities. It pits schools against LAs. At times, it can even pit parents against each other, competing for scarce resources. EHCPs secure rights, but meaningful inclusion simply cannot grow in a landscape shaped by conflict.

Inclusion requires environments to change

One of the strongest findings in my doctoral research was that inclusion happens in real time, in real relationships, in real environments. It happens when teachers take time to know a child, when peers adapt games, when teaching staff notice small signals and respond. These moments cannot be written in advance.

Although we call it a “plan”, an EHCP doesn’t actually plan anything. It describes needs and provision, but because of the focus being solely on one child, it doesn’t set out how the school will change, how staff will be supported, or how inclusion will be made possible day‑to‑day. Inclusion requires schools to change, not for children to be adjusted, supported or “fixed”. It requires staff to learn, adapt, and rethink. It requires environments and spaces to shift. It requires shared responsibility, not individual enforcement.

This is the part our current system does not address. EHCPs describe what a child needs, but they do not describe what a school needs to change. EHCPs do not create accountability for inclusion. They do not support the relational work that inclusion requires. And if we are honest, they can sometimes work against it.

We need a different kind of co‑production

The current model of co‑production has drifted into strategic territory, with it often being framed as parent carer forums engaged in planning meetings, boards, and joint commissioning groups. Parental engagement in these spaces matters, but this type of co-production is far removed from the everyday reality of a child entering a classroom and what needs to change to ensure that they can learn and be included. Importantly, not every parent can or wants to engage in strategic decision-making. Nor should we have to!

Parents should not have to design local services. What we do want is to be part of the conversations that determine what inclusion and education will look like for our own child or young person. We want co‑production that is grounded in relationships, not strategic representation. We want to work with the people who will be teaching and supporting our child, not with committees who will never meet them.

This is the kind of co‑production my research points to as being needed – practical, relational, and centred on the child’s lived experience. It needs a recognition too that inclusion is contextual. What a child “needs” to learn and develop depends on the environment they are entering, and on the people around them.

What an Individual Inclusion Plan could be…

An Individual Inclusion Plan could offer a different way of planning – actually planning – for the inclusion of children in mainstream schools. It replaces the EHCP, but it still includes entitlements to provision. An Individual Inclusion Plan would not dilute legal rights. In fact, it could strengthen them. Under the current system, rights sit with the child, but the responsibility for enforcing those rights sits almost entirely with parents. This is one of the most exhausting aspects of EHCPs.

An Individual Inclusion Plan keeps the child’s entitlements to provision exactly as they are but adds a second layer of statutory duty: the school’s responsibility to make environmental and cultural changes that enable inclusion. Instead of parents having to chase provision, schools and local authorities would be legally accountable for both delivering assessed individual support and creating a mainstream school environment where participation, belonging and safety are possible for every pupil. Rights stay with the child; accountability becomes shared.

How might this work in practice?

Before I start to explain, please remember this is conceptual, just one idea as to what else might be possible. If you do not like this idea, I would be keen to hear your thoughts, so that we can all start thinking openly about how we can improve the way we approach planning for inclusion.

This process begins with the educational setting the child and family want. Inclusion is contextual, and what a child needs cannot be understood in isolation from the environment they will be entering. So the first step is always to identify the chosen school or college, and then to explore what that specific setting needs to change to become capable of inclusion. Only once the environment is understood and strengthened can we meaningfully consider what the child needs within it.

Planning would potentially start with a structured person-centred conversation between the preferred school, the local authority (including social care), health professionals, the parents and the child. The focus is on inclusion in practice, not just provision on paper. The difference is that the starting point is the setting.

Inclusion depends on the environment, so the first question is always: what is the starting point for the school – where are they at now – and what needs to change in this school or classroom for the school to become more inclusive? This might involve staff confidence, routines, sensory considerations, communication approaches or the way learning is organised. This is written into the plan, recognising that inclusion is shaped by the environment, and that schools need support and accountability to make those changes.

Starting with the school does not mean the child becomes secondary. It means the child can only be understood accurately once the environment they are entering is capable of inclusion. Too often, children are assessed in relation to environments that are not yet accessible, and their needs are written as individual deficits. This change, where the conversation starts, ensures that needs are not inflated simply because the environment has not yet adapted and become more inclusive.

Once the environment is understood, the conversation turns to the child. What else does this individual child need to participate, to learn well, and to feel safe and connected in this particular setting, once the setting has become more inclusive and accommodating? This might involve specialist input, communication support, peer relationships or predictable routines. The focus is on the child as they are, and on how their needs interact with the environment they are entering.

An Individual Inclusion Plan is an actual plan with assigned tasks and agreed deadlines, a practical tool that keeps everyone focused on what inclusion requires in real time, rather than relying on lengthy documents that describe provision (that may or may not be delivered). It offers everything an EHCP offers in terms of entitlement and provision, plus it adds what EHCPs cannot: a plan for school‑level change and shared responsibility for inclusion of children who have greater support needs to be able to engage in learning.

What does this mean for health and social care?

Health and social care also have a clear role within an Individual Inclusion Plan. At the moment, their input is usually limited to describing the child’s needs or delivering individual therapies. But inclusion is not only an educational responsibility. Communication, sensory regulation, emotional safety and social participation all depend on health and social care expertise. In an Individual Inclusion Plan, therapists and social care professionals contribute not only to the child’s support, but also to the environmental changes the school needs to make. This might include staff training, sensory adaptations, communication approaches or relational support. Their expertise becomes part of the inclusion environment, not an isolated intervention. The new Plan creates shared responsibility across education, health and social care, and removes the burden from families who currently have to chase multiple agencies.

This matters because inclusion is not achieved through education alone. Many children’s ability to participate depends on communication support, sensory regulation, mental health input or social care involvement. If these elements are missing, inclusion collapses. By placing health and social care within the environmental planning process, an Individual Inclusion Plan ensures that inclusion is genuinely multi‑agency, not just multi‑document.

How Individual Inclusion Plans work with School Inclusion Plans

Schools will soon have to publish School Inclusion Plans. These will set out their general approach to inclusion, their training, their expectations and the way they organise learning. That is a positive step forward, but it is not enough. A whole‑school document cannot tell you what inclusion will look like for your child. Schools will likely end up publishing something fairly generic, based on National Inclusion Standards once they are published, to demonstrate compliance. Like School Information Reports and the Local Offer, they will likely be fairly static and rarely referred to.

An Individual Inclusion Plan takes the school’s inclusion commitments and applies them to the child who’s actually in front of them. It creates a shared understanding of what needs to change in the environment, what support staff need, and what the child needs to participate and learn well. It is the practical, accountable mechanism that sits underneath the school’s inclusion plan. This is how inclusion becomes real. This is how accountability becomes shared. This is how conflict reduces. This is how schools start to change.

Promoted

Imagining something better

Parents (including me) have had to fight so hard for EHCPs that it can feel frightening to imagine anything beyond them. But imagining something more is not the same as giving something up. We can hold onto rights while also recognising that rights alone, as set out in an EHCP, cannot – and do not – deliver inclusion.

We deserve a system where our children are not reduced to documents. We deserve a system where inclusion is planned, supported and accountable. We deserve a system where schools are expected to change, not just children. We deserve co‑production that happens around our child, not around a strategic table.

I am suggesting that what I am calling an Individual Inclusion Plan is one way to make that possible. I know that this might not be the right solution – it is one of many possible different ways forward. But what I do know is that we need something better than EHCPs. EHCPs, I believe, are part of the problem and can work against inclusion.

Inclusion cannot simply rely on individual rights set out in a fairly static document. Inclusion is what happens when children arrive in school. It is time our education system started planning for that.

A final note

The SNJ team have suggested I offer more clarification at the end of this post and I am happy to do so. This piece is not an argument for reducing children’s legal rights or weakening the protections that families rely on. Individual entitlements remain essential, and nothing here should be read as suggesting that statutory safeguards are optional or expendable.

What I am exploring is a broader conversation about inclusion: how we think about it, how we design for it, and how we ensure that children’s needs are met both individually and collectively.

These reflections are my own, not the official position of Special Needs Jungle. And while I’m a co-director of SNJ I’m also just a mother and researcher trying to think things through – it is important to recognise that holding a role within SNJ doesn’t mean I stop having my own views, and I’m sharing them here openly and in good faith, with the hope of encouraging respectful dialogue about how we can strengthen support for all children while protecting the rights of each child.

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About
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Sharon Smith

Co-Director at Special Needs Jungle Ltd

Sharon Smith is a co-director for Special Needs Jungle and is the mother of a young lady who has Down's syndrome. Sharon undertook doctoral research at the University of Birmingham, exploring inclusion with parents of disabled children. Following successful completion of her PhD in 2024, Sharon can now call herself Dr Smith, but rarely does. Her research interests include risk/vulnerability, belonging, co-production, inclusion and philosophy of education.