With regards to the Education Health Care Plans assessment process:
1. From the beginning of this school term, what percentage of requests made for advice from Devon County Council (DCC) Special Educational Needs (SEN) Support result in information and advice being provided for the child / young person?
During the summer term 2024: 5.7%
2. From the beginning of this school term, what percentage of requests made for advice from DCC Education Welfare Officer (EWO) result in information and advice being provided for the child / young person?
3. From the beginning of this school term, what percentage of EHC assessments where the child / young person’s school has been allocated Educational Psychologist hours have been delayed?
4. From the beginning of this school term, what percentage of EHC assessments where the child / young person’s school has not been allocated EP hours have been delayed?
In response to questions 2, 3 and 4, Devon County Council believes that compliance with these requests would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. Devon County Council does hold relevant information, however, due to the way the information is held, to locate and extract the requested information to provide a response would require the manual review of over 450 individual assessments with an estimated review time of 3 minutes per assessment, which is in excess of the appropriate cost limit.
In the interests of providing advice and assistance, the Council can provide the following information:
Schools and settings in Devon are not allocated EP time to undertake advice for education health and care needs assessments (EHCNAs), rather EPs are allocated to the child, irrespective of their school or setting.
EP time is allocated to targeted schools with high levels of SEND and Inclusion need to provide early intervention support. This is a separate role to providing EP advice for EHCNA’s, which is a statutory duty.
Since the start of the summer term, 26% of EP advice was delivered within statutory time frames, 74% of EP advice has been delayed.