What Happens During an EHC Needs Assessment? A Guide for Parents and Carers

About this guide

This guide is for parents and carers whose child is about to have, or is currently going through, an EHC needs assessment. It explains what happens during the assessment itself, in plain English, without assuming any prior knowledge of the SEND system.

The law and guidance described here apply to England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different systems, so information written for England does not transfer across.

If you have not yet made a request, our guide on how to request an EHC needs assessment covers that stage. If you are still working out what a plan is and what it does, start with What is an EHCP?

What is an EHC needs assessment?

An EHC needs assessment is a coordinated assessment carried out by your local authority. Its purpose is to build a full picture of a child or young person's special educational needs, the outcomes they are working towards, and the provision required to meet those needs — so that the authority can decide whether an Education, Health and Care plan is necessary.

It is not a single test, appointment or examination. It is a process of gathering written advice and information from a defined group of people, including you.

Five stages that are often confused

1. Requesting an assessment. A parent, a young person, or someone acting for a school or post-16 institution asks the local authority to assess.
2. The authority agreeing to assess. A separate decision, made within six weeks, against the legal test in section 36(8) of the Children and Families Act 2014.
3. The assessment itself. Advice and information are gathered from education, health, social care and the family. This is the stage this guide covers.
4. Deciding whether a plan is necessary. Another separate decision, made once the advice is in, against a stricter legal test.
5. Issuing the plan. If a plan is necessary, a draft is prepared, you comment on it, and a final plan is issued.

What happens after the local authority agrees to assess?

Once the local authority has told you it will carry out an assessment, its caseworker or SEN officer begins requesting written advice from the people the regulations require it to ask. You should be told who your point of contact is.

In practice, the early steps usually include contacting your child's school or setting, asking the health commissioning body to identify a health professional, arranging educational psychology involvement, checking whether social care is or has been involved, and sending you something to complete so that your views are recorded.

The local authority must also give you the information, advice and support you need to take part properly. If you have not been told what will happen or when, it is reasonable to ask for a written outline and the caseworker's contact details.

Who is involved in the assessment?

The list is set out in regulation 6 of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014. The local authority must seek advice and information about your child's needs, the outcomes sought and the provision required, from:

• you as the child's parent, or the young person themselves;
• educational advice, normally from the head teacher or principal of the school or setting;
• medical advice and information from a health care professional identified by the responsible commissioning body;
• psychological advice and information from an educational psychologist;
• advice and information in relation to social care;
• where the child or young person is in or beyond Year 9, advice about preparing for adulthood and independent living;
• any other person the local authority thinks it appropriate to ask; and
• any person you reasonably ask the authority to seek advice from.

That last point is worth knowing about. If a therapist, specialist teacher or clinician already knows your child well, you can ask for their advice to be sought, and the authority must do so where your request is reasonable.

The Code of Practice adds that advice should be sought from a youth offending team where a young person is detained in a Young Offender Institution, and where relevant that advice from a teacher qualified in hearing or vision impairment is involved where a child has a sensory impairment.

What information is gathered?

Every piece of advice sought must address the same three things: your child's needs, the provision that may be required to meet those needs, and the outcomes that are intended to be achieved. The Code of Practice says the advice provided should be clear, accessible and specific.

The authority must also send those it asks for advice copies of any representations you have made and any evidence you have submitted, so professionals are writing with your account in front of them.

What happens with educational advice?

Educational advice normally comes from the head teacher or principal of the school, college or setting your child attends, and in practice is usually written by the SENCO with input from teachers and support staff.

It typically describes how your child learns, what they can do, where they struggle, what support is currently in place, how often it is delivered and by whom, what progress has followed, and what the setting thinks is needed. Attainment data, attendance and any records of adjustments often accompany it.

If your child is not currently attending a school, the regulations allow the authority to seek this advice from someone else with appropriate experience of teaching children or young people with special educational needs, or from the person responsible for their education. Being out of school does not stop an assessment going ahead.

It can help to ask the school for a copy of what they submit. Our page on getting more support at school explains how the everyday support being described is meant to work.

What happens with health advice?

Medical advice and information must be sought from a health care professional identified by the responsible commissioning body. Which professional that is depends on your child — it may be a community paediatrician, a school nursing service, a therapist or another clinician already involved.

Health advice usually sets out any diagnosed conditions, current health needs, treatment or therapy involved, and the implications for a school day: fatigue, medication, appointments, sensory needs, mobility, continence, communication, mental health.

Where a child receives therapy such as speech and language therapy or occupational therapy, that advice is particularly important, because therapy that educates or trains a child is often treated as special educational provision rather than health provision when a plan is written.

If health needs are central to your child's situation, our page on health needs and education explains how the two systems are supposed to work together.

Is a diagnosis needed?

No. Nothing in the Children and Families Act 2014, the SEND Regulations 2014 or the SEND Code of Practice makes a diagnosis a requirement for an assessment or for a plan. The framework turns on a child's needs and the provision required to meet them, not on a diagnostic label. A diagnosis can be useful evidence, and it may help everyone understand a child better, but its absence is not a lawful reason to refuse to assess or to refuse a plan. Equally, having a diagnosis does not create an automatic entitlement.

What happens with social care advice?

The local authority must seek advice and information in relation to social care. Where your family already has social care involvement — a social worker, a short breaks service, a disabled children's team, a young carers service — that advice will describe the support in place and its relevance to the outcomes being sought.

Where there is no involvement, the response may simply confirm that. That is a normal outcome and does not weaken an assessment. Many children with EHC plans have no social care involvement at all.

If you think your family would benefit from social care support, the assessment is a reasonable moment to ask about an assessment of need under the relevant children's social care legislation. That is a separate process from the EHC needs assessment, and it does not pause it.

Can parents and carers provide information?

Yes, and this is not a courtesy. Advice and information from the child's parent or the young person is the first item on the regulation 6 list, and section 19 of the Children and Families Act 2014 requires the local authority to have regard to your views, wishes and feelings, and to the importance of you participating as fully as possible in decisions.

You will usually be asked to complete a form, sometimes called a parental views or 'All About Me' document, and you may be offered a conversation with the caseworker. You can also write your own account instead of, or as well as, the form. There is no requirement to use a particular format.

You are entitled to see the advice gathered about your child. Ask for copies as they come in rather than waiting for the whole bundle — it gives you time to notice gaps or errors while there is still time to raise them.

Can the child or young person contribute?

Yes. The law requires the authority to have regard to the views, wishes and feelings of the child as well as the parent, and to support their participation. For a young person over compulsory school age, the decisions are theirs to take, with support.

Contribution does not require a child to sit in a meeting or write anything. The Code of Practice recognises that views can be gathered in whatever way suits the child — observation for a very young child, drawing, photographs, a favourite adult scribing, or communication aids and systems such as picture exchange for a child who does not use speech.

This matters for practical reasons as well as principled ones. A child's own account of what is hard, what helps and what they want for the future often shapes the outcomes in a plan more clearly than anything else in the paperwork.

What other professional advice might be considered?

Beyond the required categories, the authority may seek advice from anyone else it thinks appropriate, and must seek advice from anyone you reasonably ask it to approach. Depending on the child, that can include:

• speech and language therapists, occupational therapists or physiotherapists;
• specialist advisory teachers, including teachers of the deaf or of children with vision impairment;
• CAMHS or other mental health practitioners;
• specialist outreach services attached to special schools;
• an early years setting, childminder or portage worker for a younger child;
• a youth offending team where a young person is detained.

Ask early rather than late. Requests made after advice has been collated are harder to accommodate within the statutory timescale.

What should parents tell professionals about their child's needs?

The most useful information is specific, ordinary and honest. Professionals writing advice need to understand what actually happens, not a summary of labels.

Things worth describing:

• What a typical day looks like, including mornings before school and the hours afterwards.
• What your child can do independently, what they can do with help, and what they cannot yet do.
• How long tasks take, and how much adult support is needed to start and to sustain them.
• What triggers difficulty, and what genuinely helps.
• The effect on sleep, eating, friendships, confidence and health.
• What is going well — a balanced account reads as credible and helps everyone see the whole child.

Describe your child on an average day rather than at their best or their worst. If your child masks their difficulties at school and unravels at home, say so plainly and describe both, because that pattern is easy for a school-based account to miss.

You are not expected to diagnose, to name provision in professional terms, or to produce evidence you do not have. Describing impact clearly is your contribution; translating that into provision is the professionals' job.

How should the child's needs be considered across different environments?

An assessment draws on advice from several sources precisely because a child is not the same in every setting. A structured, familiar classroom may show far less difficulty than an unstructured playground, a noisy corridor, a supermarket or a family home at the end of a long day.

None of these accounts is more true than another. Taken together they show where needs are met by the environment, where they are met by additional support, and where they are not being met at all.

If your child is currently out of school or attending part time, describe both what school looked like when they were attending and what daily life looks like now. Absence of school-based evidence is not the same as absence of need.

What happens if professionals disagree?

Advice does not always agree, and there is no statutory mechanism that decides between professionals during an assessment. The local authority considers all the advice it has gathered and forms its own view.

In practice, disagreement is often less about facts than about setting: one professional sees a child in a small room one to one, another in a class of thirty. Saying so explicitly, in writing, is usually more effective than disputing a report's conclusions.

If advice conflicts with your experience, you can:

• write to the caseworker setting out where you disagree and why, giving examples;
• ask the professional directly whether they would reconsider in light of information they did not have;
• ask that a specific additional person be approached for advice, which the authority must do where the request is reasonable;
• ask about the local authority's disagreement resolution service, which is free and voluntary.

Keep it in writing, and keep it focused on the child rather than on the report. Anything you submit forms part of the evidence the authority must have regard to.

How long does the assessment take?

The timescales all run from the date the request was received, or the date the child was otherwise brought to the local authority's attention.

• Six weeks — those asked for advice must normally respond within six weeks of the request.
• Sixteen weeks — if, having assessed, the authority decides a plan is not necessary, it must notify you by this point.
• Fifteen days — the minimum period you must be given to comment on a draft plan, to request a particular school or institution is named, and to ask to meet a council officer.
• Twenty weeks — a final plan, if one is to be issued, must be sent to you by this point.

These are not absolute. The regulations set out specific exceptional circumstances in which the timescales need not be met — broadly, where a school or early years setting is closed for a continuous period of at least four weeks around the time advice is requested, where exceptional personal circumstances affect the child, parent or young person, where the family is absent from the area for at least four weeks, or where an appointment for an examination or test is missed.

Outside those circumstances, delay is not consistent with the regulations. If a deadline passes, it is reasonable to write and ask which exception is being relied on and what date you can now expect.

What decision does the local authority make after the assessment?

Once the advice is gathered, the local authority decides whether it is necessary for special educational provision to be made in accordance with an EHC plan — the test in section 37 of the Children and Families Act 2014. This is a stricter test than the one used to decide whether to assess, which asked only whether provision may be necessary.

Whatever it decides, the authority must notify you of the outcome of the assessment, whether it proposes to prepare a plan, and the reasons for that decision.

Broadly, the question it is answering is whether your child's needs can reasonably be met from the resources normally available to their setting, or whether securing the right provision requires the legal framework of a plan.

What happens if the local authority decides to issue an EHCP?

The authority prepares a draft plan and sends it to you. The draft must not name a school or type of school — that comes later, once you have had the chance to express a preference.

You then have at least 15 days from the day the draft was served to make representations about its content, to request that a particular school or other institution is named, and to require the authority to arrange a meeting with one of its officers to discuss the draft.

Use that time carefully. It is far easier to get provision specified properly at draft stage than to change it afterwards. Look particularly at whether the provision described is specific and quantified, and whether everything identified as a need in the advice has matching provision.

The final plan must be issued within 20 weeks of the original request. Our guide What is an EHCP? explains the sections of a plan and who is responsible for delivering what, and our page for families whose child has an EHCP covers what happens once a plan is in place.

What happens if the local authority decides not to issue an EHCP?

If the authority decides a plan is not necessary, it must tell you within 16 weeks of the request, give its reasons, and inform you of your right to appeal, the time limits, the information about mediation, and the availability of disagreement resolution services and of independent information and advice.

This is disappointing, but the assessment is not wasted. It has produced a body of professional advice about your child's needs and the provision required. Share it with the school and ask for the SEN Support plan to be rewritten around it, because the school's duty to use its best endeavours to meet your child's needs continues regardless.

Our page on getting more support at school sets out what that support should look like in practice.

What can parents do if they disagree with the decision?

A decision not to issue an EHC plan following an assessment can be appealed to the First-tier Tribunal (Special Educational Needs and Disability). So can the content of the plan's description of needs and provision, and the school named, once a plan is issued.

Before registering most appeals you must first contact a mediation adviser for information and advice about mediation. You are not obliged to take part in mediation itself — only to consider it — and the adviser issues a mediation certificate either way. The deadline for appealing is two months from the date of the local authority's decision letter, or one month from the date of the mediation certificate, whichever is later. GOV.UK sets out the appeal process in full.

You can also ask the authority to reconsider, or use its disagreement resolution service, but neither pauses the appeal deadline. Note the date on the decision letter and work backwards from it.

Practical checklist for parents during an assessment

1. Note the date the request was received, and diary the six, sixteen and twenty week points.
2. Ask who your caseworker is and how to contact them.
3. Write your own account of your child's needs and their impact, and send it in whatever format suits you.
4. Ask for your child's views to be gathered in a way that works for them.
5. Ask early for advice to be sought from any professional who knows your child well.
6. Ask for copies of each piece of advice as it arrives, rather than at the end.
7. Read the advice against your own experience, and write to the caseworker where something is missing or inaccurate.
8. Keep a simple record of dates, calls and emails in one place.
9. When a draft plan arrives, check that every need identified has matching provision, and use your 15 days.
10. If the decision goes against you, note the date on the letter before doing anything else.

You do not need to do all of this, and doing none of it does not disadvantage your child's legal position. It simply tends to make the process clearer and less stressful.

If you're beginning to navigate SEND support for your child, our free SEND Starter Pack provides a practical starting point. You can also see our EHCP support page, browse the resources currently available, or start from our pages for parents and carers. If you would like to talk something through, get in touch.

Further official information

• GOV.UK — Extra SEN help and EHC needs assessments
• GOV.UK — Children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
• GOV.UK — Appeal a decision about your child's SEND support
• GOV.UK — SEND Code of Practice: 0 to 25 years
• Children and Families Act 2014, Part 3
• The Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014

Free, independent advice on your own situation is available from your local SENDIASS service, and from national organisations such as IPSEA and Contact.

Law and guidance can change. This guide was last reviewed in September 2026 and reflects the position in England at that time.