School Support in the UK: EHCP and SEND Explained

School support in the UK for children with special educational needs and disabilities, usually shortened to SEND, is organised in layers. Most support starts inside school itself, through what schools call SEN support, planned and checked in cycles often described as the graduated approach. If a child's needs call for more than the school can ordinarily provide, a parent, the school or a young person can ask the local authority for an EHC needs assessment, which may lead to an education, health and care plan, usually called an EHCP. Plans are checked at least once a year at an annual review. This guide explains how those layers fit together in general terms. It is not advice about any individual child, and official sources and your own local authority pages govern in every real case.

It helps to see the system as a staircase rather than a single door. The first step is ordinary classroom teaching, adjusted by the teacher: seating, instructions given in smaller pieces, extra time to settle. The next step is SEN support, where the school adds planned help and records what it is doing. The graduated approach is the cycle schools use here: assess, plan, do, review, then adjust and go round again. Above that sits the EHC needs assessment, run by the local authority rather than the school, and, where the authority agrees, an EHC plan that sets out needs, outcomes and the provision to be made. Each layer adds paperwork, but also adds clarity about who is doing what.

Three sets of people recur in every guide in this corner. The class teacher holds day to day teaching and usually notices first what helps in the classroom. The SENCO, the special educational needs coordinator, is the named member of staff who coordinates support in school, keeps the school side of the paperwork and is often a parent's first meeting. The local authority, your council, runs EHC needs assessments, issues and maintains EHC plans, and publishes the Local Offer, its directory of local SEND services and information. Health professionals and paediatricians may contribute reports or advice into assessments, but the plan itself belongs to the local authority. Knowing which desk a question belongs on saves weeks of sending the right letter to the wrong place.

Parents often meet this system through paper: provision maps, support plans, meeting notes, letters from the council with dates on them. The habits that make the paper manageable are simple and are covered across this corner: keep everything in one folder in date order, write down agreed actions after each meeting, and note deadlines on a calendar the day a letter arrives. The guide on keeping records through the review year turns that into a steady routine rather than a panic before a review. None of this changes what a child receives, but it changes how clearly a parent can follow what has been agreed, what has happened, and what is still outstanding, which is the ground every calm conversation stands on.

Families comparing notes quickly discover that two children in different towns, or even different schools in the same town, can have quite different experiences of the same national framework. That is built into how the system runs. Schools organise SEN support in their own way, local authorities publish their own Local Offer and run their processes through their own teams, and Scotland and Wales use different systems altogether, covered in Scotland and Wales: different systems, same paperwork habits. So treat any single family's story, including stories online, as one example rather than a rule. The national framework gives the shape; your school and your council fill in the local detail, and their published pages are the ones to check.

Start where your child actually is on the staircase. If support is at school level, the SENCO and the graduated approach are your starting points. If an assessment or a plan is already in motion, the annual review cycle and your council pages matter most. Read the guides in this corner in any order, use the official sources listed below to check anything that matters, and remember that understanding the shape of a system is a legitimate first step in itself, taken one page at a time.