EHCP: What is a Social Care Provision that Educates or Trains?

Created: 4/29/2024

What is an Education, Health and Care plan?

An Education, Health and Care Plan, or EHCP is a legal document that is person specific. It details the education, health and social care needs of a child or young person up to the age of 25 (or the end of the academic year in which they turn 25) who lives with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND).

A child or young person will usually have an EHCP if they require special education provision to be make that typically is not available in their school. An EHCP can be requested from a local authority (if the child is aged 16 or above, they can request one themselves) who will decide whether they need to carry out an EHC needs assessment.  The local authority will say within 16 weeks whether they are going to issue an EHCP.  Once a draft EHCP has been issued,  parents and young people have at least 15 days to comment on the draft report including requesting that a specific school or college is named in the plan. Following receipt of the comments, the local authority has 20 weeks in which to issue the final plan. If parents and young people are not happy with the final plan, they can challenge the local authority about the special educational provision in the plan (including health or social care provision that should be treated as a special educational provision) or the school or college named in the plan.  They can also challenge a local authority's decision not to issue a EHCP or not to assess in the first place, by making an appeal to the First-Tier Tribunal (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities).  Since 2018, they can also extend the appeal and request that the Tribunal make recommendations in respect of the health and social care sections of the plan.

Social Care Provision that Educates or Trains

Sections D and H of the plan should identify all the social care needs of the child or young person and the provision required from the local authority to meet those needs.  The SEND Code of Practice specifies that social care needs should relate to the needs identified in a piece of legislation from 1970 called the Chronically Sick and Disabled Person's Act.  They are:

However, the Children and Families Act 2014 states that a social care provision should be treated as a special educational provision (and therefore included in section F) if it educates or trains.  The significance of a social care provision being in section F rather than section H is that a Tribunal can order the local authority to provide all the provision in section F, but only recommend the provision in section H.

The dividing line between pure social care provision (section H) and social care provision which goes further and actually educates or trains a person (section F), is fine. It is not enough that social care provision happens to educate and train in the sense that the child or young person learns something from that provision, otherwise every provision would then naturally fall into this category. It is also not enough for there to be a need to generalise skills learnt during the usual school or college day; that would require a social care provision, not a special educational provision.  

Social care provision would include (but not be limited to), improving the child or young person’s ability to generalise skills learned during the day, requiring a consistent approach across all settings and providing respite and access to the community. On the other side of the line (a social care provision that educates or trains), there falls systematic instruction, the reinforcements of skills, generalisation and supporting children and young people to learn skills beyond the usual school or college day. This will normally involve staff outside of the usual school day who are trained to deliver programmes or approaches from appropriate professionals. This may include activities devised by or in conjunction with paid carers and the educational placement, which complement and replicate at least partially what has been done during the school or college day. It includes understanding the learning undertaken in the education environment, which is necessary to take out of that environment, and supporting the child or young person to complete the new learning and apply it. Despite being instructed in these matters, and attending Tribunal hearings since 2018, it is a very fine line (and sometimes a very difficult decision) between a social care provision should be treated as a special educational provision or one that should be treated as a social care provision.