(UK) Staffs: Almost 500 SPED students waiting more than 20 wks for services
- The end of childhood
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Nov 25, 2025, StokeOnTrent: 480 Staffordshire special needs children stuck too long on council waiting list
There are also waits for an EHCP
Hundreds of children in Staffordshire are still waiting more than 20 weeks for a legal document detailing their special educational needs and the support they require, councillors have been told. Staffordshire County Council has seen demand grow for support for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) over recent years - and the number of children with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in the county had risen to more than 8,000 last year.
If a child or young person needs an EHCP, because their special educational needs require more help than would normally be provided in a mainstream nursery, school or college, this document should be completed by the county council with a 20-week timeframe. But almost 500 children who had been assessed were waiting longer than 20 weeks, members of the council's Safeguarding and Education Overview and Scrutiny Committee heard.
Some families were also waiting several weeks for a decision on whether their children would be assessed for an ECHP in the first place, the meeting was told. . . .
Councillor Matthew Wallens asked how many children were currently waiting beyond the target time of 20 weeks for an EHCP.
Dr Hulusi responded: "Significantly fewer than in July - we currently have around 480 children beyond 20 weeks waiting for a final EHCP. That is regrettable and we're doing what we can to address that challenge. We've had recent capacity to blitz a backlog of assessments and 300 of those assessments were taken in-house, into the central SEND team. Those 300 that were waiting the longest have been taken into a specific team to target those assessments and make sure they're completed by December 2025. Current reports from that team indicate that they are on track to complete those 300."
A Local Area SEND inspection carried out in November 2018 found "significant areas of weakness", leading to a written statement of action being required to address the issues raised. A re-visit was carried out in early 2022, which identified that "sufficient progress" had been made in tackling six of the significant areas of concern, but insufficient progress had been made to address two other weaknesses.
Following the 2022 inspection re-visit, the Staffordshire SEND partnership, which involves the council's children’s services, health partners, education providers, parents and carers, was required to produce an Accelerated Progress Plan (APP) to address the two remaining areas of weaknesses identified – coproduction and quality of EHCPs.
A report to the committee said: "Since May 2022, the Staffordshire SEND partnership has been subject to APP reviews by the Department for Education (DfE) and NHS England. To date, these reviews have provided assurance that the APP is purposeful, well managed and yielding positive outcomes in the remaining two areas that require improvement."
Committee chair Councillor Tracey Dougherty said: "I think that perhaps the reason we have so many EHCPs at the moment is because of the lack of early years intervention. What do you propose going forward to address that?"
Dr Hulusi responded: "I don't think intervention in the early years is the only factor for the significant number of Education, Health and Care Plans. There are multiple factors why we have so many EHCPs in Staffordshire.
"However, in terms of early intervention I would completely agree with the premise of your question. There is an awful lot of work going on in the early years space - our early years team have increased their capacity to respond and ensure that the children with the highest level of need in the early years are identified and early years intervention is in place to mitigate those challenges they experience.
"From January we are going to be launching a pre-statutory intervention for the early years. That's something we have been doing at school age for nearly two years now, with the 'enhanced assess, plan, do, review' intervention, where we've had over 1,000 accessing that particular intervention, and those early intervention methods are now going to be in place for the early years children.
"There are lots of reasons why early intervention or increasing early intervention will have an impact on those numbers, but I wouldn't underestimate the impact of Covid, the impact of challenges we're facing from a societal perspective, an economic perspective and general changes in attitude and experiences for young people and families in Staffordshire. If you layer that onto some of the effects of cuts that we've seen in education and social care more broadly, then that's a pretty toxic cocktail in terms of putting barriers in front of children's development."
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