Cllr Brunt, in his capacity as performance monitoring lead for the Panel, raised the issue of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) to seek further clarity on this performance indicator.

Jane McSherry, Assistant Director for Education, highlighted that progress on EHCPs is tracked using two indicators although only one is reported in the basket of measures.  The first indicator is the transfer of SEN statements to EHCPs on which there is good progress with the target of transferring all by the end of March 2018 nearly achieved.  There are approximately 20 transfers that may not be completed by the 31^st March 2018 deadline. This is for a variety of reasons including the child being overseas or in mental health provision (Tier 4).  This measure isn’t included in the basket of performance indicators.

The second indicator relates the provision of new plans within the 20 week deadline.  This measure is included in the basket of indicators. Currently, only 37% of new plans are being achieved in this target timescale.  However, it was highlighted that this compares with only 19% of plans hitting the 20 week target at the same point last year.  Additionally, the vast majority are actually achieved within 26 weeks, only just passed the target. 

The Assistant Director highlighted that this is against a backdrop of rising demand; the number of EHCPs maintained by Merton is increasing by 250 – 300 additional EHCPs per year. All require support from a variety of professional services (for example speech and language therapists, educational psychologist etc) which have limited capacity and therefore can cause delays.  However, whilst the 20 week target isn’t being hit in the majority of cases, there have been low levels of requests for mediation and tribunals which is seen as a positive indicator about the quality of the EHCP service.

The transfer to EHCPs has been supported by a small grant that has paid for some additional staffing.  It is also intended to consult on utilising a web-based system to start managing EHCP applications.  This will allow better tracking and enable parents to be kept informed of progress without having to be in contact with a member of staff, taking pressure out of the system caused by the large volume of telephone calls.

Once the transfer to EHCPs is complete, the team will be reconfigured to focus on new applications for EHCPs and continuity of oversight once the assessment process is completed.