Lancashire SEND assessment backlog slashed

The backlog in the assessment system for determining the support required by Lancashire children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is on course to be cleared in less than two months.

That is the expectation of the politician who has been leading attempts to turn around a service that was criticised for “unacceptable” delays just over a year ago.

A damning Ofsted inspection report in February 2025 said hold-ups in the Lancashire County Council process for issuing new – and updating existing – education, health and care plans (EHCPs) meant some young people were not receiving the help to which they were entitled.   Annual reviews of their requirements were sometimes “many years” late, the regulator found.

Figures obtained by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) reveal that the number of overdue EHCP assessments has dropped by 80 percent in the space of little more than a year – from 1,801 in December 2024 to 360 as of January this year, the latest month for which data is available.

Meanwhile, the backlog of assessments awaiting advice from an educational psychologist has fallen by the same proportion, but in an even shorter timeframe – down from 2,078 cases in May 2025 to 425 at the end of January.

The county council’s cabinet member for education and skills, Matthew Salter, says that, barring “hiccups”, he is hopeful that the outstanding delays can be eliminated by the end of April.

Reflecting on the nine months since he took up his post as part of the Reform UK administration that won control at County Hall last May, he attributed progress in improving the SEND system to a combination of practical solutions and a shift in attitude.

The new ruling group added £5.4m to the SEND budget after taking office – in addition to the £5m extra put in for 2025/26 by their Tory predecessors.  County Cllr Salter was part of that previous Conservative administration for seven years before defecting to Reform shortly ahead of last year’s local elections.

The cash boost was used to help cover the shortage of in-house educational psychologists – a gap that lay at the heart of the EHCP backlog – by drafting in agency staff.

“You’ve got, on average, over 300 families coming forward each month who need an [EHCP] assessment – [but] your capacity is [to do] 53.   That’s just not going to work.

“So it’s something, right from the off, we needed to put more resources into,” County Cllr Salter said.

The LDRS understands that 110 agency educational psychologists were taken on to work through the delayed assessments – 10 times the full-time equivalent number of permanent county council staff in that role.

The constant flow of assessment requests – either for initial EHCPs or reviews of previously-issued plans – means that there will always be a sizable number in the system awaiting completion at any one time. But the aim now is for none of them to have exceeded the statutory timeframe within which they should be completed.

As of January, there were 2,330 ‘open’ EHCPs in the county council area – which excludes the standalone local authority patches of Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen – but that was down from 3,111 in May last year.

The plans are crucial, personalised documents that set out the support local authorities must provide to meet the needs of children who require additional assistance in order to access education.

Ofsted itself acknowledged a recent “surge” in requests for EHCPs in Lancashire, in common with a nationwide trend.

New EHCPs should be issued within 20 weeks, but they also have to be reviewed every year – and a decision over whether to amend them or leave them unchanged should be taken within a month.

However, County Cllr Salter said he wanted to do more than just the minimum needed to address to the waiting time deficiencies identified in the Ofsted report, which also highlighted what it described as “widespread…systemic failings” resulting in “significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children and young people” with SEND.

“When I came in, I would say that there was an approach of, ‘We’re on a SEND improvement journey [and] we know that we’ve got targets from the Department for Education, that we’ve got to [hit].

“[But] we were very clear [that] we wanted to genuinely deliver an improvement in experience for families and young people. So we said, what [are] the resources that you need to clear the backlog?

“We’ve also [done] a lot of work…to make sure that [we] can keep it clear, because it would be no good to have invested millions of pounds…and then, at the end of it, have insufficient capacity and, all of a sudden, you’re [back] in a very bad place.

“The experience for parents who have been told everything’s sorted…could be [that they end up] in a very difficult, confrontational situation with the county council again. We didn’t want that rollercoaster,” County Cllr Salter said.

To that end, at last month’s budget, the authority allocated a further £7m to bolster its SEND ‘inclusion service’.

County Cllr Salter hopes that educational psychologists working with the authority are now having an experience that will persuade more of them to seek employment with the county council directly, rather than via agencies – and says the benefits would cut both ways.

“People who work for a council often want to spend their time in schools with young people – and we [previously] had a situation where we had so little capacity, that they were having to do this constant stream of assessments and not that very rewarding sort of work [which is] what would drive [them] into the profession.

“We want to have more working with schools and more embedding of those professionals in schools…in what is ultimately a win-win.   If the schools can have a better…understanding of what’s going on for a particular young person and put the right mitigations in place, sometimes you may not have to spend as much money, and sometimes you may have better outcomes.

“If you can achieve that, [you are delivering] what the family wants, what the school want[s] [and] what we would want.

“It may be that [the young person] doesn’t actually need an education, health and care plan – or it may be that they need [one], but it might be possible to meet [their requirements] in a mainstream setting rather than a specialist setting.

“So there’s a lot of value in good, early intervention and in getting to have that well-rounded understanding of the young person as an individual – and also the family can see that there’s been proper engagement taking place, [so] you have that good relationship with [them],“ County Cllr Salter explained.

Meanwhile, the authority’s increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has also extended to the EHCP process – but, he insists, in a way that complements, rather replaces, staff.

“For a caseworker who’s writing an EHCP, they’re having to synthesize and pull together a huge amount of information.   You’ve also got to make sure that when you’re issuing a plan, that there’s various key bits of information [contained within it] for it to be compliant.

“In the past, sometimes things could be missed and a lot of work could go into…[what] looks, on the face of it…not a successful plan.”

Asked by the LDRS whether all judgements in relation to EHCPs remained human ones, County Cllr Salter said: “Absolutely.”

As for the black cloud being cast across the SEND service by the EHCP backlog this time last year, he is “confident” that it will have finally lifted before April is out.

“You’ve [then] got to the point where you’ve cleared the…assessments [you] didn’t have the capacity for previously – [and then] it is just about getting to that sustainable position where you’re issuing plans in line with the new young people who are coming forward month by month.”