Yesterday, the Department for Education (DfE) published its annual statistical summary of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in England – a bit later than usual, and with a bit more background fanfare than usual.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that the government is planning deep and far-reaching changes to the English SEND system. They’ve revealed almost no details about what this reform will look like, only that proposals will now be laid out in the autumn.
Statistical health warning
But it’s fairly clear that the people who lead and operate the SEND system view the number of children and young people who need EHCPs as a major problem they want to deal with. So you can expect these EHCP stats to be spun more than usual – and that makes our annual health warning about these figures more important than usual:
- These figures don’t cover all children and young people with SEND, just those with EHCPs. Only one in every four school pupils with SEND has an EHCP. If you want data that covers all school pupils with SEND, then we published on that a couple of weeks ago.
- The EHCP data comes from a local authority census return that was conducted in January. That means the data mostly just tracks EHCP paperwork and processes. The stats don’t tell you anything directly about the quality of the EHCPs or whether the provision specified in the EHCPs was even provided.
- Some of these figures are tricky—particularly compliance with the statutory duty to produce new EHCPs within 20 weeks. It’s also entirely possible for LAs to make their EHC needs assessment refusal rates look low by simply running up a big backlog of unfulfilled requests. On the other hand, if an LA has a very low EHC needs assessment rate but a relatively high EHCP refusal rate, that’s not necessarily sharp practice.
The way that the EHCP data is collected changed a few years ago, because the DfE wanted to know a lot more from LAs about their EHCP caseloads and processes. That process hasn’t had the kinks fully ironed out of it yet, but this year the DfE has issued a lot more specific data on EHCP caseloads and processes than they have previously. This is a good thing, but not every LA has been able to report in full. So we’re going to take a bit more time in going through some of the extra detail, and we’ll report back if we find anything particularly juicy.
So with that warning, what have we learned this year?
If time is short, check out our infographic below – but otherwise, keep reading….
Growth in EHCP Numbers
The overall number of children and young people with an EHCP continues to rise at a steady rate. In mid-January 2025, there were around 638,700 EHCPs. That’s 11% more than last year.
When people talk about an “exponential rise” in the number of EHCPs, this is what they mean. The rate of growth in EHCP numbers has been steady for many years now, and the number of children and young people with SEND who get support through a statutory plan has more than doubled since the 2014 SEND reforms.
In the first few years after the 2014 reforms, most of this growth was down to the expansion of plans in the post-16 sector. These days, the growth in EHCP numbers is largest among school-aged children, not just in primary, but also in secondary. The number of pupils with EHCPs still appears to be growing faster in mainstream schools than in special schools. While we can’t tell from these figures alone, it’s reasonable to ask whether the sharper rise in mainstream EHCPs is happening in part because state special schools are rammed.
Where are the children with EHCPs?
- In January 2025, the number of pupils with EHCPs in mainstream schools was up by 12% on the previous year, at around 278,000.
- Those numbers include the mainstream independent sector, where the number of pupils with EHCPs is up by 6%. At January 2025, there were around 7,200 pupils in this category.
The number of pupils with EHCPs in special schools is also growing, but at a slower rate than mainstream numbers, and at a slower rate than the previous year.
- In January 2025, the number of children and young people with EHCPs in special schools was around 194,000 – up 5% on the previous year. Most of that increase was in state special schools, but the growth rate was highest in the independent special school sector.
But the EHCP growth rate is highest in a statistical group described as “educated elsewhere” – a 22.5% increase year-on-year.
There are now 50,000 children and young people with EHCPs in this category – a damning indictment of how well SEND system leaders meet the needs of the people they are employed to serve.
This group is mostly made up of children and young people for whom formal education and training just isn’t working. They include kids in ‘elective home education’ (we’ve put quote marks round that, as ‘elective’ often means there is no suitable school available); situations where the LA has funded arrangements it or parent carers have made, usually known as EOTAS, (education other than at school); and young people classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET).
Commentators and lobbyists who lecture us on the broken nature of the SEND system have plenty to say about kids with EHCPs in independent special schools. But there are almost twice as many children and young people with EHCPs who have no functioning school, college or work placement at all. Those same commentators and lobbyists have nothing to say about the latter group. Why? It’s pretty simple. Most of the kids in this situation cost the SEND system nothing.
Most kids in independent special schools are there because they crashed and burned out of state education. But if your child with SEND crashes, burns and doesn’t cost gatekeepers money, then the only interest the state appears to have is the potential for these kids’ families to pose a safeguarding risk. For many years, the most common search term used on Special Needs Jungle’s website was ‘SENCO.’ These days, it’s ‘EOTAS.’ And that says something.
Assessments, New EHC Plans, and Annual Reviews
Yesterday’s data dump contains a lot of information about the EHCP process itself. And for the first time, it also contains data about EHCP annual reviews.
- In all, around 97,750 new EHCPs were issued in 2024. That’s 15% up on 2023’s number, a hefty increase, but a slower year-on-year growth rate than the previous year.
- In 2024, roughly 75% of children and young people with box-fresh EHCPs were placed in mainstream schools, similar to 2023.
- There were roughly 154,000 initial requests for an EHC needs assessment in 2024 – that’s a 12% increase on 2023. We know from our own investigations that most of those requests usually come from schools, and that fewer than 30% come from parent carers.
- From the data, it looks like around 45,000 EHCPs were ceased in 2024, for all sorts of reasons: people moving house, young people moving into work or higher education, or because the LA decided that the child or young person didn’t need an EHCP any longer.
- The number of ceased plans is higher than ever before, but it’s still a lot lower than the number of new EHCPs.
- And the most common reason for ceasing plans, according to this data, is that “the young person no longer wishes to engage in education or training.” Remember that it’s the LA filling in this census. If I were an inspector, I’d want to look really hard at the reasons why, and whether this genuinely reflects the young person’s aspirations.
SEND system leaders are very keen to trim, cut, or slash EHCP numbers. As with recent years, the data suggests that many LAs are trying to act on this pressure.
- The proportion of LA refusals to conduct an EHC needs assessment (EHCNA) is slightly up. At least one in four of these requests was refused by local authorities in 2024.
- This refusal rate is an underestimate because it includes EHC needs assessment requests that were still being processed. If you strip the data back to actual decisions made in 2024, then the actual percentage of refusals is far higher: 35%.
- EHCNA refusal rates continue to vary hugely from LA to LA – check our Hall of Shame graphic for more. Indeed, some LAs refuse most initial requests, because they know a majority won’t want to, or won’t have the capacity to go through an appeal.
- We know from our previous investigations that requests from SEND families are far more likely to be refused than requests from schools and organisations, and that LAs are most likely of all to refuse direct requests from young people with SEND.
The annual LA Hall of Shame
If the LA agrees to conduct an EHC needs assessment, they then decide whether to issue an EHCP or not. The rate at which LAs refused to issue an EHCP after an EHC needs assessment is steady at around 6%.
- Again, this is an area with massive postcode lotteries. The LAs at the top of the Hall of Shame are refusing to issue at five times the national average, whereas others will issue a plan in almost every case.
LAs have a statutory requirement to produce new EHCPs within 20 weeks. Remember, this is a legal duty, not a target or a service benchmark – so it should be close to 100%.
In 2024, the percentage of new EHCPs produced within the statutory 20-week timescale in 2024 was 46% – the lowest on record. There’s always been a lot of variation in LA compliance with this duty, and the spread is even wider this year. 12 LAs completed less than 10% of their new EHCPs within the 20-week limit, and 21 LAs completed over 90% of them within 20 weeks.
For the first time, the DfE has issued data on the EHCP annual review process. We’ve previously reported on how broken this process is, and Ofsted and Care Quality Commission area SEND inspections regularly note this too. This data will take us a while to go through, and there are a worrying number of LAs who still seem completely unable to pony up the numbers, but here are some headline numbers:
- These are annual reviews; the expected frequency is fairly obvious. But in January 2025, about a quarter of EHCP annual reviews hadn’t taken place since the end of 2023.
- SEND regulations stipulate that once an annual review meeting has taken place, the LA must communicate its decision about whether to maintain, amend, or cease the EHCP within four weeks. This data suggests that in 2024, LAs on average met this requirement 44% of the time.
- Data on what happens when LAs make annual review decisions is a bit sketchy: for those LAs that can track the process and report it to the DfE, there’s no outcome recorded for roughly one in five reviews. But most often, the LA will amend the EHCP rather than maintain it.
Tribunal Appeal Rates
It’s useful to have this data on EHCP annual reviews for lots of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that it can give us a better handle on the rates at which families are appealing to the SEND Tribunal (SENDIST).
You can only appeal to SENDIST for specific reasons. Statistically speaking, the most common opportunity for families to appeal is after an EHCP annual review.
The SENDIST tribunal stats have long assumed that all theoretical opportunities to appeal exist in reality. But that’s not happening in reality, because the EHCP annual review system is so broken. This year, the DfE has issued some revised statistics that try to reflect this. Now that they have better EHCP annual review stats, it’s possible to get a more realistic handle on SENDIST appeal rates.
The DfE stats are experimental and not every LA has provided them with data, so treat with caution for now. But what’s been issued shows that the SENDIST appeal rate has been systemically lowballed, probably for years.
- In 2023, the ‘official’ SENDIST appeal rate stood at 2.5% – that’s the rate based on theory, where everyone gets the opportunity to appeal that they should get in law.
- In 2024, the ‘official’ SENDIST appeal rate stands at 3.2% – again, that’s the theoretical rate.
But the DfE now reckons that almost half of the theoretical opportunities to appeal—opportunities that families should have had—never actually materialised in reality. That’ll mostly be because of botched EHCP annual review processes.
It’s still early days for this, but what this means is the real SENDIST appeal rate looks like it’s almost twice as big as the official rate, somewhere between 5.7% and 6.1%. Given how bad some of the LAs are that couldn’t provide data for this exercise (hello, Surrey), the national SENDIST appeal rate may well end up being higher.
Basically, if your LA is a clown show when it comes to EHCP annual reviews, then their appeal rate will probably be several times higher than the official stats say. For example, in Hertfordshire, their official appeal rate for 2024 is 4.4%. Their DfE-derived appeal rate statistic is around 28%. That’s an astonishng and appalling figure
There’s a lot more data to play with in this EHCP release than in previous years. That’s somewhat ironic, as the DfE mulls the future of EHCPs themselves. But we’ll keep digging and report back with whatever else we find.
Check out the infographic
PDFs: Main infographic | Hall of Shame
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- The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reforms
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- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support
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- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN
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What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?May 16, 2025
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Matt specialises in SEND stats, data analysis, and in-depth investigations of policies. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, and his articles for SNJ on SEND funding, local government policy, and the SENDIST Tribunal have been quoted in Select Committee inquiry reports and national media.
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support - August 19, 2026
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters - July 22, 2026
- EHCPs 2026: A relentless rise, but who’s surprised? Plus SNJ’s annual LA Hall of Shame - June 27, 2026
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