Three Agencies, No Lead: The Education, Health and Care Plan for Looked-After Children

The Education, Health and Care Plan was introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014 as a single, coordinated document replacing the fragmented architecture of statements, learning difficulty assessments, and individual education plans that preceded it. Its ambition was the right one: to bring education, health, and social care together in a document that named a child's needs, specified the provision to meet them, and set out the outcomes to be worked toward. For most children with SEND, this coordination happens — imperfectly, unevenly, but within a single local authority commissioning environment that at least shares a geography. For looked-after children with EHCPs, the picture is systematically more complicated. The care framework and the SEND framework operate on different legislative bases, different timescales, different accountability structures, and different review cycles, and neither was designed with the other in mind. The result is that a looked-after child with an EHCP — a population representing over a third of all children in residential care — sits at the intersection of two statutory frameworks that rarely talk to each other as effectively as both claim they do, and the consequences fall on the child.

The annual review of an EHCP and the looked-after child review are the two most significant statutory processes in a young person's care career, and for a looked-after child with an EHCP they are almost always conducted separately, attended by different people, and used to produce documents that do not reference each other in any meaningful way. The care plan, in principle, should reflect the educational provision specified in the EHCP. The EHCP, in principle, should be informed by what residential workers observe about how the young person learns, regulates, and functions across the day. In practice, residential homes are rarely invited to EHCP annual reviews. The annual review is typically managed by the child's current educational setting, attended by educational professionals, and conducted without reference to the care plan, the keyworker's observations, or the home's understanding of what has changed since the last review. The LAC review, conversely, tends to treat the educational picture as a column headed by school name and attendance percentage, without the depth of information about what the EHCP says, what provision it specifies, whether that provision is being delivered, or whether the outcomes it describes bear any resemblance to what is actually happening for the young person. The two documents proceed on parallel tracks, updated by different people with different knowledge, and the child in the middle is expected to benefit from coordination that is not, in practice, occurring.

The Virtual School Head is the statutory role designed to be the connective tissue between the care system and the educational framework, including the EHCP. VSH teams are explicitly tasked with advocating for the educational needs of looked-after children and with ensuring that the Pupil Premium Plus — currently around two thousand four hundred pounds per looked-after child per year — is spent purposefully on provision that addresses identified need. Where EHCPs are concerned, the VSH's role is to ensure that the plan reflects the child's current needs, that Section H — the social care provision element — is completed accurately for looked-after children in its area, and that the annual review process is joined up with the child's wider care planning. In reality, VSH teams are frequently under-resourced for this coordination function, and the Section H of many looked-after children's EHCPs is either blank or contains provisions that were specified years ago and have never been updated. The placement-change problem compounds this. When a young person moves to a new residential home in a different local authority, the EHCP remains the legal responsibility of the originating authority until the new authority accepts the transfer — a process that carries a statutory timeline but frequently exceeds it in practice. During the gap, the young person arrives in a new home, often mid-academic year, with a plan that references a previous setting, a previous level of need, previous provisions, and outcomes that may have been set when the child was considerably younger. The home does not have the plan. The school does not have the plan. The VSH in the new authority does not yet have responsibility for the case. The young person, who is already navigating the upheaval of a new placement, is doing so without the educational safety net their EHCP is supposed to provide. This is not an unusual sequence of events. It is a common one, and the failure is systemic.

What residential homes can do within this landscape is more than most currently attempt, and it begins with something deceptively simple: reading the EHCP. Not the summary. The plan. A home that has not read the full EHCP of every young person in its care does not know what that young person is legally entitled to, cannot identify the gap between what the plan specifies and what is actually being delivered, and cannot speak credibly at a review about what they have observed. Section B describes the young person's needs across all areas of development. Section E sets out the long-term outcomes. Section F specifies educational provision — hours, type, frequency, delivery setting — in terms that create a legal obligation on the local authority. Section H specifies social care provision in equivalent terms. A home that can read these sections alongside each other, and that can identify where provision specified in Section F is not being made or where Section H has never been completed, is equipped to do something real: request an early review, raise the gap as a concern at the LAC review, contact the VSH, or — as a last resort — advise the young person or their advocate of their right to appeal to the SEND Tribunal. These are not actions that require specialist legal training. They require familiarity with a document the home is entitled to hold and an understanding of what it means. The EHCP annual review is also an opportunity for the home to put its observations into a statutory record. What the keyworker notices about how the young person processes information, regulates their attention, manages transitions between activities, responds to different kinds of adult support — this is observational data with clinical-grade specificity that the educational setting, however good, cannot access in the same way. A home that submits a detailed written report to the annual review and attends where practicable is not bureaucratically exercising a right. It is contributing directly to the quality of a document that specifies this young person's legal entitlements. Most homes do not currently do this. The gap between what they observe and what makes it into the EHCP is one of the most consistent missed opportunities in the residential care of children with SEND.

The transition dimension of the EHCP is where the stakes are at their highest and where the coordination failures are at their most damaging. An EHCP can continue until the age of twenty-five, provided the young person remains in education or training, and the legislative intention is that the 'Preparing for Adulthood' pathway begins to shape the plan from age fourteen onwards — shifting emphasis from placement and provision in the immediate term to outcomes in adult life: employment, independent living, health, and participation in the community. For looked-after young people approaching their eighteenth birthday, the Preparing for Adulthood pathway coincides precisely with the most disruptive transition they will face — the shift from children's services to adult social care, from foster or residential care to whatever housing and support arrangements follow. Two cliff edges are converging on the same point in time, and the EHCP is supposed to be the bridge across both. In practice, the Preparing for Adulthood content of many EHCPs for looked-after young people is thin, over-general, or calibrated downward to match what local adult services are thought likely to fund rather than what the young person actually needs. Homes that understand this dynamic — that know the difference between an outcome statement that creates a genuine expectation and one that has been quietly diluted to avoid creating an obligation — are homes that can advocate for the former. The place to do that advocacy is not at seventeen and a half, when the transition is imminent. It is at fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen, in every annual review, in every LAC review that touches on future planning, in every supervision session where a young person's post-eighteen life is on the agenda. The residential home knows this young person — their capacities, their difficulties, the support that makes a difference, and the absence of support that leaves them unmoored. That knowledge is exactly what the EHCP process needs and rarely receives in full. The home that understands the EHCP framework well enough to insist that its knowledge counts is the home that can make a material difference to the statutory document that will shape a young person's entitlements long after they have left its care.