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3 ways we're improving the quality of EHCPs in Hertfordshire

Published Wednesday 25 November 2020

In partnership with Herts Parent Carer Involvement (HPCI), we've set up a number of projects looking at the quality of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in Hertfordshire, and how to ensure consistent high quality.

We look after around 8000 EHCPs for young people aged 0 - 25 with SEND. Every EHCP should help a child or young person to develop and live the life they want to live.

We get great feedback about the impact of good quality plans, but we also sometimes hear that there are elements of some plans that do not meet our expectations. We've heard that:

  • the child and family's voice is not always included
  • information from health and social care can be out of date

We also know that the provision set out in the plan needs to be specific and measurable - and nationally, this is an issue.

We want to make sure that we are building on the good practice we already have in Hertfordshire, and ensuring that EVERY child's plan is high quality.

1. We want to create a new EHCP 'Quality Framework'

This will be a shared definition of what "good quality" looks like for EHCPs in Hertfordshire, and the ways we expect our services to work to deliver good quality. We will include the ways that we will check and monitor quality too. Education, health and social care colleagues will all be involved in regular monitoring of the EHCPs, and we will be ensuring that EHCP quality is a top concern for service leaders, too.

3. We're looking at the paperwork and processes used to collect advice and information about young people

We want to make sure that we're asking the questions in a way that gets useful quality answers for the assessment and review processes. This is because better quality information leads to better quality plans. We're helping SENCOs to make recommendations about new ways to measure progress for children and young people with plans too.

We expect each one of these projects to help ensure we're delivering consistently high quality EHCPs over the next year or so, but taken together we're really excited that these projects can really help children and young people benefit from the plans they receive, and help leaders quickly identify any further improvements that can be made.

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