Why scrapping Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) isn’t the answer

Here at Speech and Language UK, we know how difficult it is for children and young people to get the help they need when they struggle with talking and understanding words.   

Families tell us about exhausting battles for support that should be simple – support that helps children learn, make friends, achieve qualifications and live full, thriving lives. 

Teachers tell us that 2 million children struggle with speech and language in their classrooms. And those are just the ones they know about. Many more go unnoticed, wrongly labelled as disruptive or misdiagnosed with mental health or behavioural issues. 

What support they do get has been stripped away over the years: fewer speech and language therapists, less training for teachers, no clear national strategy. As a result, more and more families are turning to Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) just to get basic help for their children. Demand is up, but it’s a laborious and often costly process where many families are wrongly denied with 97% of denials being overturned on appeal.  

As a result, waiting lists are growing. And now – shockingly – the Government’s response appears to be not to fix this, but to take even more away. There have been news reports from Government sources about taking away individual education, health and care plans from children with speech and language challenges – and that this will be OK because of programmes and therapists that the Government is putting into mainstream.  

Let’s be clear: children who need speech and language therapy to support them, but not an adapted curriculum or specialist teacher, don’t get an EHC plan now! 

So when government advisors talk about children ‘just’ needing speech and language therapy not having an EHCP, we wonder who they are talking about. When they talk about the Early Language Support for Every Child (ELSEC) or the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) being the solutions, we are baffled.  

These programmes were never designed to help children with the most complex speech and language challenges and never can do that.  

For the children who have short-term speech and language challenges, and in combination with better training and other programmes, we would support both ELSEC and NELI in principle. But on their own, they are likely to fail many children with speech and language challenges. 

Right now there are hundreds of thousands of children and young people for whom the complexity of their speech and language challenges means they need the support of expert staff on a daily basis who can adapt the curriculum to help them learn and provide intensive input to help them to learn. This could include specialist teachers, an adapted curriculum and other therapists like Occupational Therapists or physios.  

The level and complexity of support for this group of children requires a plan to identify what children need, who should provide it and what outcomes for the child everyone should be working towards.  

Children with speech and language challenges deserve to have a fair chance to thrive and investing in them makes economic sense as well. With the right support in place, fewer young people will develop mental health difficulties, leave schools without jobs or further education opportunities. It will even reduce the pressure on the youth justice system as 2/3 of young offenders have speech and language challenges.  

For some children, the complexity of their speech and language challenges means that even with the best support, a mainstream classroom simply can’t meet their needs. These children need a specialist setting – like Dawn House School, our school in Nottinghamshire. 

At Dawn House, children get access to: 

• A curriculum adapted by experts including Speech and Language Therapists who understand how they communicate 

• A supportive environment where communication isn’t a barrier to learning 

• Support from Speech and Language Therapists, Occupational Therapists and physiotherapists where needed 

• Specialist technology called Augmented and Assistive Communication Aids which help children gain their voice  

Without an EHCP, these children would never reach Dawn House. They would likely remain in mainstream classrooms, unable to access learning, falling behind, isolated, and at growing risk of mental health challenges. Or even worse: they would be at home without an education at all. Dawn House has a specialist unit called Chimes for children with additional barriers to education – and children who attend that unit have often spent up to two years out of school before coming there. They can only get back to learning through 1:1 support, initially in individualised classrooms, from specially trained Teaching Assistants, teachers and therapists.  

Special schools aren’t for every child. But for those who need them, they can be life-changing. Removing EHCPs for children with speech and language challenges would effectively shut the door on this option — not because a child should lose the right to learn, but because the system refuses to see them. 

While putting more speech and language therapists into schools would be a welcome move, there is so much more the Government could do to improve outcomes for the 2 million children with speech and language challenges: 

• Training every teacher and early years practitioner to boost speech and language development for typically developing children and to adapt their teaching practice for children with lifelong speech and language challenges.  

• Equipping every school and nursery to track children’s speech and language development so they can detect problems early and intervene early – and therefore prevent future problems like mental health problems 

• Giving every child the chance to join group language programmes rather than only providing these in Reception

• Developing standards and accreditation for more specialist help (sometimes called resourced provision) in mainstream and special schools, rather than leaving their quality to chance   

Taking away the right to an Education, Health and Care plan for some of the children who need it most would be a backwards, not progressive step. Legally enforceable, individualised plans are used by countries around the world to make sure that children with complex needs get what they need to learn. They’ve been used in this country since Thatcher because governments of many different political persuasions have recognised they are essential to make sure these children don’t lose out from wrongly-motivated budget cuts at local or national level, or from culture wars instigated by people who don’t understand them.  

Slashing this support to balance the Treasury’s books isn’t just short-sighted, it’s a false economy. Investing in every child’s future fuels long-term growth and, crucially, empowers them to thrive – in education and beyond.