A neurodevelopmental lens on English primary schools.

· · · · pupils

Choosing a primary school?

See how a school compares with similar schools on how it identifies and supports children with autism and other neurodevelopmental needs — even if your child doesn't have an identified need today.

Start typing a school name, postcode or URN above. seND Lens draws on four years of DfE data and benchmarks each school against local-authority and similar-intake peers. Best read as a prompt for further investigation, not a verdict on any school. See About for how to read what we show.

Looking at primary schools and not yet thinking about SEND? Most special-educational-needs identification happens during the primary years — between Years 1 and 5, with the bulk in Years 2–4. A child showing no signs at age 4 may well be identified by age 8 or 9. Even if SEND isn't on your radar now, how a school handles SEND is a useful window into its overall pastoral care, communication, and willingness to advocate for individual children.

Local Authorities — primary ASD EHC progression

Every English LA ranked by the median primary school's EHC progression rate for pupils identified with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (2024/25). Progression = EHC plans ÷ (SEN support + EHC plans).

What this comparison shows — and what it doesn't

The variance between local authorities is far larger than the variance between schools within an LA. Refusal rates and on-time issuing rates vary sharply by area. In recent tribunal statistics, parents won around 99% of EHC tribunal cases that reached a full hearing, and published analyses estimate local authorities spent over £153 million defending appeals. A child's postcode can be one of the biggest practical predictors of how quickly, and how fairly, the EHC pathway works.

The table below ranks LAs by the median school's primary ASD EHC progression rate, which is one slice of that bigger picture. For the full systemic context — what's driving LA variation, the financial pressure on LAs that runs through to March 2028, and what it means for an individual child — see The wider system.

# Local Authority Region Primaries ASD pupils Median % Range (25-75) vs National

Academy Trusts — combined primary ASD EHC conversion

Multi-Academy Trusts ranked by the combined (pupil-weighted) EHC conversion rate across all their state-funded primaries (2024/25). When a trust's pattern is consistent across its primaries, that's a stronger signal than any one school — it points to trust-level practice or policy.

# Trust Primaries ASD pupils ID rate Conv rate vs National conv

About seND Lens

seND Lens is a free, independent tool that compares English primary schools on how they identify and respond to children recorded with autism as their main special educational need — used as the best available public proxy for a school's wider response to neurodevelopmental needs. It draws on four years of public Department for Education data and is intended for parents researching schools.

What we show

For each English primary, seND Lens displays two figures and the context around them:

  • Identification rate — the share of pupils the school identifies with autism (ASD), compared to similar schools in the same local authority.
  • EHC progression rate — of those pupils identified with ASD, the share who have moved onto a formal Education, Health and Care plan, again compared to similar schools.

Alongside those, we surface the school's Ofsted inspection (with SEND-relevant grades highlighted), its Ofsted Parent View result for SEND-parent satisfaction, and its suspensions and permanent exclusion rate against peers. Together these form a picture — never a verdict — of how the school approaches pupils with additional needs.

Where the data comes from

All figures are drawn from public Department for Education and Ofsted releases:

Source data is released under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Why this exists

seND Lens is an independent project. It is not affiliated with the Department for Education, Ofsted, any local authority, or any individual school. It was built because the public data on SEND is hard for parents to read in school-by-school form, and because the most useful comparisons — same local authority, similar intake — aren't published anywhere directly.

How to use this page

Treat every figure as a signal worth investigating, not a verdict on the school. The strongest information you can have about a school's approach to SEND comes from talking to the SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator), reading the school's SEN Information Report, and speaking to other SEND parents at the school. seND Lens is meant to tell you which schools and which questions are most worth following up.

A note on what "EHC progression" measures. EHC plans are used as the primary signal throughout this site. They are a proxy for a school's willingness and ability to escalate needs to a formal, legally-protected level of support — not a direct measure of the quality of the support itself. A school with high EHC progression is not necessarily "better" than one with lower rates, but when a school sits persistently below comparable schools in its own LA, the question is worth asking. See Methodology for the full explanation.

For the analytical detail and the choices behind the comparisons, see Methodology. For practical guidance on reading what we show and conversations with schools, see For parents.

Independence, corrections, and right of reply

This site is operated independently. We welcome feedback, factual corrections, right-of-reply requests and methodology challenges from schools, parents, journalists and researchers. Contact sendlens@proton.me. If you're a journalist using this data, please contact us before publication — there are caveats and context that don't always appear on the public pages.

seND Lens is built on a small set of deliberate analytical choices. This page walks through each — what we measure, why we measure it that way, what the comparisons can support, and what they can't.

Why focus on autism (ASD)?

The rate at which children are identified with special educational needs varies enormously by area, for reasons that have little to do with the school: deprivation, demographics, parental advocacy, intake patterns. Comparing absolute SEN rates between schools mostly tells you about catchment, not about practice. The rate at which already-identified SEN children progress to a formal Education, Health and Care plan, by contrast, depends much more on what the school and the local authority do with those children — and is therefore a more meaningful comparison.

Within SEN, autism has three properties that almost no other need category combines:

  1. It is closer to a defined condition than most "needs" labels. Autism is normally identified through clinical or diagnostic pathways, even though the school-census field is still an administrative record. Most other DfE need categories — SEMH, SpLD, MLD, Other — are educational catch-alls that bundle very different underlying conditions. Because autism points at a more defined condition, the expected support profile is narrower and the school-to-school comparison is more like-for-like.
  2. It is prevalent enough to be visible at school level. Autism affects roughly 1–2% of pupils, which gives most primaries a non-trivial cohort to compare on. Rarer specific conditions would meet the first criterion but show up in such small numbers per school that no comparison could be made.
  3. Recorded autism is less school-led than many categories. The recorded autism population is less correlated with school intake than, say, SEMH or speech-language-and-communication needs, both of which depend heavily on a school's own identification practice. Autism isn't free of confounders — girls and ethnic-minority children are documented to be under-diagnosed, diagnostic waiting lists vary regionally, and school recording still matters — but it is the cleanest signal for school-agency that the public data offers.

Why primaries only?

Almost no children enter Reception with an EHC plan (national rate around 1–2%). By Year 6, around 5% of pupils have one. That growth happens in school, with the school's SENCo as the evidence-gatherer and parent partner. Secondaries inherit a large fraction of their EHC pupils from primaries, so the conversion-rate signal at secondary is largely historical — and complicated further by parental school choice (families with SEND children actively select secondaries with strong SEND reputations). Restricting the headline view to primaries puts the school's own role in the foreground. Secondary data is shown when searched, with a prominent caveat.

How we compare schools — four layered controls

A school's EHC progression rate can move for reasons unrelated to its practice. seND Lens layers four controls so that what's left, when the comparison still shows a gap, is harder to attribute to factors outside the school's control:

  1. We only compare like-with-like phases. A state-funded primary is compared only to other state-funded primaries. Special schools, secondaries and independents are different systems and aren't mixed in.
  2. We compare you to other schools in the same local authority. Local-authority-wide EHC processing bottlenecks affect every primary in that LA equally — they don't explain why one school in the LA differs from another. Cross-LA comparisons mix the school with the LA's own processing speed.
  3. We compare you to other schools with similar levels of deprivation in the same LA. Schools are grouped into five free-school-meal-eligibility bands (national primary quintiles). The "same LA, same FSM band" peer pool removes most of the deprivation argument: if a school still sits below comparable-intake schools in its own LA, a "tougher catchment" explanation no longer fits.
  4. We test the picture over four years. Single-year figures are noisy — a chunk of recent identifications mid-cycle, a SENCo who left, a single severe case. None of those persist across four years. When a school sits below LA peers in four out of four years, "this year is unusual" runs out of room. When the picture is mixed, the language softens accordingly.

Why we treat higher EHC progression as the better direction

This is the most contentious analytical choice on the site and worth explaining in full. A common objection runs: "low EHC progression might mean the school provides such strong in-house support that pupils don't need to escalate to a formal plan."

That explanation is sometimes true. Some children are well supported at SEN Support and do not need a statutory plan. But across a whole school, and especially across several years, a persistently low progression rate needs more explanation. EHC plans are the formal route when ordinary SEN Support is not enough: they bring a statutory assessment, specified provision, legal accountability and, where agreed, local-authority top-up funding.

Several pressures can suppress progression even where a child's needs might justify it: limited SENCo time, thin evidence-gathering, local-authority refusal culture, budget caution, concern about legally binding provision, and in some cases pressure for children to move elsewhere rather than escalate support. Those mechanisms are set out in The wider system.

So higher EHC progression is not a school-quality score. It is treated as the better direction because, all else equal, it suggests the school is more willing and able to document need, escalate when ordinary support is not enough, and persist through the statutory process. Low progression can still have benign explanations, but when it is well below similar schools in the same LA, it is a signal worth following up.

Worth noting for autism specifically: autism is lifelong. Good early support can make a very large difference to distress, access to learning and day-to-day functioning, and individual support needs can change over time. But the "good early support resolved the underlying need" argument has less force for autism than it would for some needs that may be shorter-lived or more directly remediable.

What the comparisons can and can't tell you

What they can support. When a primary school sits well below comparable schools in its own LA on autism EHC progression across multiple years, the plausible explanations narrow:

  • The school's response to identified SEN. EHC plans don't require severe need — they require documented evidence that ordinary SEN support has been tried and isn't sufficient (needs can be broad, specific, or hard to accommodate in a mainstream setting without being "severe"). That evidence is generated by the school itself: planned interventions, regular reviews, recorded outcomes. Where a school's SEN Support practice is comparatively thinner, the case for escalating to an EHC plan can be harder to build — even where significant need is present.
  • School-level advocacy. The SENCo's relationship with the LA, willingness to apply, willingness to handle appeals — these vary substantially between schools in the same LA.
  • Recent staffing change. A SENCo leaving mid-year can briefly suppress applications. The four-year test is designed to catch this.

What they can't rule out completely.

  • Severity within a need category. Autism is a spectrum. Two schools with similar free-school-meal eligibility in the same LA could genuinely have different severity profiles in their autism cohorts. After deprivation controls, very large prevalence differences are less plausible than differences in recognition, diagnosis access or recording practice — but identification access varies, and milder identifications progress to EHC at lower rates.
  • Cultural and demographic variation in seeking diagnosis. Documented variation in who pursues formal autism assessment.
  • Sub-LA caseworker variation. Some LAs split EHC casework geographically, and individual officers can be stricter or more lenient.
  • Small-cohort noise. With fewer than around 15 autism-identified pupils on roll, multi-year consistency claims are weaker because many of the same children appear in the figures year-on-year — so the four-year picture isn't four independent samples.

What these comparisons should not be used as. A verdict, a score, a school-quality ranking, evidence in a complaint, or material for a press story without follow-up. Treat every position on the site as a prompt for further investigation: a conversation with the SENCo, the school's most recent Ofsted SEND inspection, and the LA's published SEND Local Offer.

What about ADHD, dyspraxia, and other conditions?

ADHD probably follows some similar mechanics to autism — diagnosis is usually clinically led, prevalence is higher (around 5–7% of children), and the school-agency story should often generalise. The reason we can't measure ADHD directly is the DfE census itself: ADHD isn't a primary need category. ADHD pupils are typically coded under SEMH (Social, Emotional and Mental Health), occasionally SpLD or Other. So we can't separate ADHD from those broader categories using the public data.

The practical implication: if a school looks below-typical on autism identification or progression, it's reasonable to assume it probably looks similar on ADHD too. The underlying school practice — screening, evidence-gathering, EHC advocacy — applies across conditions. We just can't show you the ADHD figure directly.

For other neurodevelopmental conditions (dyspraxia, Tourette's, developmental language disorder), the same logic broadly applies. For physical, sensory and medical needs (hearing impairment, visual impairment, physical disability), it doesn't transfer as cleanly — those categories cover an enormous range of severity, and provision often runs through specialist external services rather than the school's general SEN-response infrastructure. A school that handles autism well isn't necessarily a school that handles physical-disability provision well, and vice versa.

How Ofsted, Parent View and exclusions are surfaced

Ofsted inspection. We show the school's latest overall grade and date, and highlight the sub-grades most relevant to SEND. Under the EIF framework (used 2019–September 2024) these are Leadership and Management, and Quality of Education. Under the framework from September 2024 onwards these are Inclusion, Curriculum and teaching, and Leadership and governance. Where an inspection is more than four years old, we add a freshness caveat.

Parent View — SEND parent satisfaction. Parent View is Ofsted's running parent-feedback survey. Question 7b asks whether the school supports the parent's child specifically with SEND. We compute % of SEND parents who agree (strongly agree + agree, excluding don't-knows). Treat the figure as directional: response rates are self-selected and structurally lower in more-deprived schools, and the score is based only on parents who identified themselves as SEND parents — sometimes a handful.

Suspensions and permanent exclusions. We pool termly DfE data from 2021/22 onwards and express the rate as events per 100 pupils per term (DfE's own convention; annualise by multiplying by three). The 2026 DfE release no longer breaks SEN-specific exclusions out at school level, so we surface the school-total rate against similar-intake LA peers. This can be the more informative public signal: weaker SEND systems may under-identify pupils, so the same children's challenges can be logged as "general behaviour" rather than as SEN events — the total rate partly captures that pathway. Across the dataset, there is a strong negative relationship between a school's ASD EHC progression rate and its removal rate (β = −0.73, p < 0.001 controlling for LA and FSM band) — schools that progress fewer pupils to formal plans tend to have higher suspension rates. This is observational, not proof that one causes the other, but it is consistent with an "off-ramp" dynamic rather than just coincident catchment effects.

The nine at-a-glance signals explained

The overview grid shows nine KPI boxes across three themes. Here is what each measures, where the data comes from, which direction is better, and the main caveats.

Signal What it measures Source Better direction Main caveat
School climate
SEND parent satisfaction % of SEND parents who say the school handles their child's needs well (Ofsted Parent View Q7b, strongly agree + agree, excluding don't-knows) Ofsted Parent View (latest available snapshot) Higher is better Self-selected respondents; response rates are structurally lower in more-deprived schools; a small denominator makes the figure volatile. Treat as directional.
Persistent absence % of pupils missing ≥10% of possible school sessions in the year DfE Pupil Absence in Schools (latest year) Lower is better Absence captures a mix of factors including health, family circumstances, and disengagement. High absence in a SEND context can signal unmet or under-supported need, but a single-year figure is noisy.
Suspensions & exclusions Formal suspensions and permanent exclusions per 100 pupils per year, pooled from 2021/22 onwards DfE Suspensions and Permanent Exclusions (all years from 2021/22) Lower is better Captures school-total, not SEN-specific (DfE no longer publishes SEN-level school data). Catchment effects are partially controlled by comparing within LA and FSM band.
Identification & escalation
ASD identification % of pupils identified with autism as their main SEN need (SEN support + EHC combined) DfE SEN in England census (latest year) Higher is not simply better — the signal is comparison against similar-intake peers. A school notably below its peers raises a question about identification practice. Autism identification has known under-diagnosis patterns (girls, ethnic-minority children, late-presenting presentations). A low rate may reflect diagnostic access rather than school practice.
EHC plan rate (ASD) Of all pupils identified with autism, the % who have an EHC plan (rather than being on SEN support only) DfE SEN in England census (latest year) Higher is generally treated as the better direction, because EHC plans are the statutory route when ordinary SEN Support is not enough. See the methodology above. EHC plans are jointly issued by the school and the local authority. A persistent gap vs peers is harder to explain away; a single-year gap could reflect LA processing delays or a SENCo change.
EHC rate — ND cluster Of all pupils identified with ASD, SEMH, or SLCN (the three most diagnostically overlapping need types), the % who have an EHC plan DfE SEN in England census (latest year) Higher is better The cluster is designed to catch children who may be in a "pre-diagnosis holding category". Lower cluster rate than ASD rate alone can suggest SEMH/SLCN pupils are not progressing. A school with low ASD rate but near-average cluster rate may be routing children through proxy categories.
Staffing & capacity
Support staff FTE teaching assistants and support staff per 100 pupils (School Workforce Census headcount converted to FTE) DfE School Workforce Census (latest year) Higher is better Support staff numbers are strongly correlated with school deprivation (more-deprived schools attract more TA funding). The FSM-band peer comparison partially controls for this. The signal is most meaningful when a school's staffing is low relative to similar-intake peers in the same LA.
Teacher turnover % of teachers who left the school during the year DfE School Workforce Census (latest year) Lower is better Some turnover is normal. High turnover relative to peers signals instability in institutional knowledge, which matters disproportionately for SEND — continuity of the SENCo relationship and familiarity with individual children's needs is harder to maintain in high-turnover schools.
Staff sick days Average days of sickness absence per teacher per year DfE School Workforce Census (latest year) Lower is better High sick-day rates can reflect workforce stress or a difficult school environment rather than individual health. Treat as a weak secondary signal rather than a standalone indicator.

Limitations we know about

Distinguishing genuine small schools from under-identification. Suppressing every school with a small autism cohort would hide the cases where small cohort is itself the signal. A 250-pupil primary in a high-deprivation band where comparable schools identify around 4–6% of pupils with autism is producing a meaningful signal if it has only 2 pupils identified with autism, not "insufficient data". We compute the expected autism cohort given the school's size and the median identification rate of comparable-intake LA peers. When that expected count is at least 7 and the actual cohort is half or less, we flag the school as "identification looks low"; between 5 and 7, we flag "identification may be low". Below 5, the school is small enough that natural cohort variation could explain the gap and we don't flag.

Breakdown rounding. About 8–12% of schools have small mismatches between the headline SEN/EHC counts and the sum of the 13 by-need columns — DfE small-number rounding at the breakdown level. Visible as minor discrepancies in the breakdown charts but doesn't materially affect headline figures.

2024/25 reclassification. Down syndrome was recorded as a distinct need type for the first time in 2024/25; pupils previously placed in SLD, MLD or Other may have moved category and trend lines for those metrics are flagged.

FSM as a deprivation proxy. Free-school-meal eligibility is an imperfect proxy for catchment deprivation — it captures an absolute eligibility threshold, not a continuous spectrum — but it is a standard and widely used control in education data analysis. Residual catchment effects on autism severity after FSM-band controls are probably small but not zero.

Independents and special schools. Both appear in search but the primary-focused interpretation doesn't apply to them: independents report SEN differently and often sit outside the same EHC placement and funding routes; special schools admit pupils with EHC plans almost exclusively.

If you're choosing a primary school

You may not be thinking about SEND right now. Most parents aren't. But most special-educational-needs identification happens during the primary years — typically between Year 1 and Year 5, with the bulk in Years 2–4. A child who shows no signs of additional needs at age 4 may well end up identified by age 8 or 9. That's why we think it's worth at least a brief look at a primary school's SEND track record, even if SEND isn't currently on your radar.

Schools that handle SEND well tend to be schools that pick up on emerging needs early, intervene proactively, and engage parents from the start. Those qualities help every child — not just those with confirmed needs. A school's SEND practice is a window into its overall culture of pastoral care, communication, and willingness to advocate for individual children.

What you're entitled to expect from any school

Before going to a school with questions, it's worth knowing what the law says schools must do. These are statutory entitlements under the SEND Code of Practice — knowing them puts you on much firmer ground in any conversation.

  • A SEN Information Report. Every school must publish one on its website, updated annually. It describes the school's SEND policy, the support available, how progress is reviewed, who the SENCo is, and how to raise concerns. If a school can't easily produce it, that itself is informative.
  • The graduated approach — "Assess, Plan, Do, Review". For any pupil receiving SEN Support, the school must work through cycles of: assessing the child's needs, planning the support, putting the support in place, and reviewing whether it's working. Asking "how does Assess-Plan-Do-Review work in practice here?" is much more concrete than "how does support work?".
  • The "best endeavours" duty. Schools must do "everything they could reasonably be expected to do" to meet a pupil's SEN. This is the legal standard, and the phrase is worth knowing — it's how IPSEA and SOS!SEN advise parents to frame challenges.
  • Regular meetings with parents. The Code of Practice expects schools to meet parents of SEN-Support pupils at least three times a year to discuss progress against the cycle of support.
  • The right to request an EHC needs assessment yourself. Parents can request an EHC needs assessment directly from the local authority — without the school's involvement, if necessary. The LA must respond within six weeks. The school does not have a veto on this.

For deeper guidance on any of these, the most authoritative free resources are: IPSEA, Contact, SOS!SEN, and Special Needs Jungle.

How to read a school's page on this site

Every school page leads with two figures: the share of pupils identified with autism, and the share of those who have moved onto an EHC plan. Each comes with a comparison against similar schools in the local authority, and a "what this could mean" interpretation.

The most important thing to understand: none of what we show is a verdict. A red flag means there's a question worth asking; it doesn't mean the school is bad, and it doesn't mean the school is the wrong choice for your child. Conversely, an "all clear" reading doesn't guarantee the school will be right for an individual child either — only conversations with the SENCo, visits, and (ideally) other SEND parents can do that.

The four most informative things a school page can tell you:

  • Identification rate well below similar schools. The school may not be picking up children that comparable schools do. Worth asking how screening and identification work.
  • Progression rate well below similar schools, despite typical identification. The school recognises needs but the pathway to formal plans appears thinner than at comparable schools. This is the "strong identification, lower progression" pattern — worth asking about evidence-gathering, applications, and appeals practice. (For context on why this gap can open up at any school, see The wider system.)
  • A trust-wide pattern. When the same picture shows up across several schools in a Multi-Academy Trust, the signal is harder to pin on one school's circumstances.
  • Consistent picture across four years. One year of unusual figures might be cohort variation. Four years of the same picture is much harder to attribute to randomness.
One more thing worth knowing before you read any school's page. The school is only half the picture. The other half is your local authority — its refusal rate, its on-time rate, its tribunal behaviour, its financial position. The variance between LAs is much larger than the variance between schools within an LA, and it's the part of the system you have the least direct control over. See The wider system for the disincentives that operate on schools, the paradoxes that shape LA behaviour, and why both matter for your child.

Questions to ask the school

If something on a school's page prompts a question, a conversation with the SENCo is the most useful next step. Below: questions that work for any school, questions for parents whose child already has an identified need, autism-specific questions, and questions tied to the specific patterns we might flag.

For any school you're considering

  • Can I see your SEN Information Report, and your contribution to the LA's Local Offer?
  • How does the school identify pupils with potential SEND? At what point does that move into formal SEN Support?
  • Can you walk me through how Assess, Plan, Do, Review works in practice here, for a typical pupil on SEN Support?
  • What evidence and documentation does the school typically gather at SEN-Support level — interventions tried, outcomes measured, reviews held?
  • How are SEND review meetings structured? How often? How are parents involved in setting outcomes?
  • At what point — and how — would the school decide to apply for an EHC plan?
  • If a parent disagrees with the school's SEND assessment, what's the process for raising it?
  • What outcomes do you track for SEND pupils — attainment, attendance, wellbeing?
  • How is the SENCo role configured? Full-time, or also teaching? What's their caseload?
  • Can I speak to another SEND parent at the school?

If your child already has an identified need or EHC plan

  • What's the process for transferring an existing EHC plan into the school?
  • Who would be my child's named adult / key worker on a typical school day?
  • How are reasonable adjustments decided — who's involved, what's the timeline?
  • How is the SENCo's caseload structured? How much one-to-one time would my child realistically have with them?
  • How does the school manage handovers between class teachers, year groups, and at break and lunch?
  • What training do teaching assistants have specifically on the kind of needs my child has?

Specifically for autistic children

Process and policy answers only get you so far. These questions get at what a typical day actually looks like for an autistic child at the school.

  • How is the sensory environment in classrooms managed — noise, lighting, layout, transitions between activities?
  • What's available during unstructured time — breaks and lunch? Is there a quieter space staffed and open?
  • How are transitions handled — between classrooms, activities, and at the start and end of the school day?
  • How does the school approach communication preferences — including pupils who need processing time, who communicate non-verbally, or who use augmentative communication?
  • How is sensory or emotional dysregulation responded to? What's the policy around meltdowns or shutdowns? Is staff training in non-restrictive approaches a recent thing or longstanding?
  • How are friendships and social interaction supported, particularly at break and lunch?
  • What autism-specific training have teachers and teaching assistants had — when, by whom, and how recently? Are any staff trained through the Autism Education Trust (AET) framework?

If we flag identification looks low

(i.e. fewer autism-identified pupils than would be typical for the school's size and intake.)

  • Comparable schools in this LA typically identify more autistic pupils than the figures here show. How does your school's screening for autism work, and what training do staff have in recognising it?
  • What's the school's working relationship with the local CAMHS and paediatric services?
  • Are there pupils whose behaviour or learning suggests possible SEND but who aren't currently on the SEN register — and if so, why not?

If we flag progression to EHC plan looks low

(i.e. fewer autism-identified pupils have moved onto an EHC plan than at similar schools in the same LA.)

  • How many of your current autism-identified pupils have you applied for an EHC plan for in the last two years? How many were granted? How many were refused or appealed?
  • What's the school's policy when ordinary SEN support isn't enough to meet a child's needs?
  • Can you walk me through the evidence the school typically generates for an EHC application — interventions, reviews, baseline assessments?
  • If an EHC application is refused, what's the school's role in supporting an appeal?
  • When ordinary SEN Support is not enough, how does the school decide whether to request an EHC needs assessment?

If we flag the strong identification, lower progression pattern

(i.e. the school identifies autism readily but moves few of those pupils onto EHC plans.)

  • The figures suggest your school identifies autism well but moves comparatively few of those pupils onto EHC plans. What's the school's view of why that gap exists?
  • How would you describe the level of SEN Support provided to autistic pupils here, compared to comparable schools? What does a typical pupil on SEN Support actually receive?
  • For autistic pupils on SEN Support, what specific provision is in place that distinguishes them from pupils without SEN?
  • Where significant SEND need is present but no EHC plan is in place, how is that need being supported and funded?

If we show a pattern across the trust

(i.e. the same picture appears across multiple schools in the same Multi-Academy Trust.)

  • How is SEND policy and practice set at trust level versus school level?
  • Does the trust have a central SEND lead? What's their role across the trust's schools?
  • How does the trust support SENCos with EHC applications? Is there a shared evidence-gathering process or a central legal resource for appeals?

Questions that get past policy to practice

Schools that handle SEND well tend to answer these openly. Schools that retreat to policy language often haven't worked through them.

  • Tell me about a SEND child you've supported particularly well. What did that look like? What made the difference?
  • When SEND support hasn't gone as well as you'd hoped, what have you changed?
  • What do you find hardest about supporting SEND pupils in this school?
  • How do you decide which interventions to invest in — what's worked here, what hasn't?

No school is obliged to provide this information to a prospective parent, but most schools genuinely committed to SEND will welcome the conversation. The quality of the answers — not just whether they're given — tells you a lot.

Common questions and pushbacks

Answers to the questions you might have looking at what we show — including the ones a school might raise if you took our figures to them.

A school says they support so well at SEN-support level that EHC plans aren't needed. Does that not explain low progression?

Sometimes, yes. Some children are well supported at SEN Support and do not need an EHC plan. That is why the site treats the figures as a signal, not a verdict.

But if a school is persistently below similar schools in the same LA, the "we support so well that plans are not needed" explanation should be tested, not simply accepted. Other common explanations include thin evidence-gathering, limited SENCo time, budget caution, local-authority refusal culture, concern about legally binding provision, or ordinary SEN Support being kept lighter than the child's needs really require.

The practical question to ask is: show me how you know ordinary SEN Support is enough. Look for written Assess-Plan-Do-Review cycles, clear intervention records, parent reviews, outside-professional input where needed, and a willingness to escalate if progress is not being made. The fuller explanation of the disincentives is in The wider system.

Our LA is slow with EHC applications — surely that's why our school's figures look low, not anything the school is doing?

True for some of the gap, but not for most of it. The site's primary comparison is within the same LA — so LA processing speed is held constant. If your LA is slow, every primary in your LA experiences the same slowdown. That doesn't explain why one primary in the LA progresses 30% of autistic pupils to EHC plans while another in the same LA progresses 5%.

The site does flag when the LA itself sits in the bottom quarter of all English LAs — and acknowledges that much of any gap to the national figure is structural to the LA. But within-LA differences point at the school and its cohort, not at LA processing.

Could the school's autistic pupils simply have lower support needs than other schools' pupils?

Yes, sometimes. Autism is a spectrum, and two schools with the same number of autistic pupils can have different mixes of need.

That explanation carries less weight when the comparison is against similar-intake schools in the same LA and the pattern persists over several years. It carries more weight when the cohort is small, the school's identification rate is unusually high, or the school can show that pupils are making progress through well-recorded SEN Support.

The useful follow-up is not "prove your pupils are severe enough". It is: how do you assess need, how often do you review provision, what evidence would trigger an EHC needs-assessment request, and what happened in the cases where ordinary support was not enough?

This data must be years out of date by now.

Most of the data is from the 2024/25 academic year — collected in the Spring 2025 census, published by DfE in summer 2025. Within statutory data publication cycles, that's as current as it gets.

Some parts can be older. Ofsted inspection grades are the obvious example: Ofsted operates on a multi-year cycle, so a school's last inspection might be from 2020 or 2021. We show the inspection date prominently and add a caveat when the inspection is more than four years old.

The reason the data is still useful is that the site is mostly trying to read school posture, culture and process over a three-to-five-year period. Those things usually do not transform overnight. But they can change: a new head, a new SENCo, a trust intervention, an Ofsted inspection or a change in LA practice can all alter the picture. Treat older signals as questions to test with the school, not as current proof.

This is all about EHC plans, but most SEND children do not have one. How does this affect SEN Support?

Fair question. EHC plans cover a minority of SEND pupils, so the figures are not a direct measure of everyday SEN Support for every child.

They matter because EHC progression is one of the few public signals of the machinery underneath SEN Support: whether the school identifies need early, records interventions properly, reviews progress with parents, brings in outside advice, and escalates when ordinary support is not enough. Those same habits shape the experience of children who never need a plan.

So the link is indirect, but not remote. A school that is weak at evidence-gathering, review cycles or escalation may also be weaker at ordinary SEN Support. A school with strong SEN Support may never need to escalate some children — but it should still be able to show clear records, review points and decision-making when asked.

Why are some schools missing Parent View data?

Ofsted suppresses school-level Parent View data when fewer than 10 parents have responded — that's their threshold for protecting individual anonymity.

Worth knowing: response rates are structurally lower in more-deprived schools. Our analysis found a strong negative correlation between FSM% and Parent View response rate (r = −0.51). Schools without Parent View data tend to be schools where engaged parents aren't responding in numbers — that can itself be relevant context, rather than purely random missingness.

Should I move my child to a higher-progression school?

Not on the basis of what we show alone. seND Lens provides descriptive context, not a quality ranking, and a school's progression rate doesn't tell you what life is like for an individual child there.

What we're useful for: spotting which schools to investigate further. Pair what you see here with the school's Ofsted SEND inspection findings, conversations with the SENCo, the LA's published SEND Local Offer, and ideally visits to the schools you're considering. Other parents of SEND children at the schools you're choosing between are also a much better source than any aggregated statistic.

Why focus on autism specifically, not other needs?

Autism has the cleanest school-agency signal of any major SEN category in the dataset. Three reasons:

  • Autism is usually linked to clinical or diagnostic pathways, rather than being a purely school-led label. So the recorded autism population is less skewed by school intake than SEMH or speech-language-and-communication needs.
  • Underlying prevalence is generally estimated around 1–2% of children, while recorded prevalence varies with recognition, access to diagnosis and school recording practice.
  • Autism is one of the more common reasons for an EHC plan, so per-school cohort sizes are usually large enough to compare on.

Other needs (SEMH, SLCN, MLD, and so on) carry stronger socio-economic confounders. We'd extend to them with care, but the framing wouldn't transfer one-for-one. See Methodology for the longer version.

Why are secondaries flagged differently from primaries?

Two reasons:

  • Most secondary EHCs come from primary. By Year 7, plans are largely in place from primary years. The secondary school had little to do with the conversion itself — they inherited it.
  • School choice is parent-driven at secondary level. Families with SEND children actively seek out secondaries with strong SEND reputations. A high-progression secondary may reflect parents selecting in rather than the school creating the conversion.

We still show secondary data, but with a prominent caveat and the school-agency interpretation language dampened.

Is the Parent View "SEND satisfaction" figure reliable?

Treat it as directional, not as a quality score. Three issues:

  • Self-selection. Engaged parents respond more than less-engaged ones. The figures structurally skew toward parents who chose to respond.
  • Response-rate bias. Lower-response schools score lower on average — partly because polarised responses are more common when only a handful of parents respond, partly because deprived schools (which respond less) get systematically understated. Our analysis showed a roughly 4-percentage-point swing across FSM bands attributable to response rate alone.
  • Q7 only counts SEND parents. If 30 parents responded to the survey and only 3 said their child has SEND, the SEND-satisfaction figure is based on 3 responses. Worth treating with significant caution at small response counts.
My school only has 2–3 autism-identified pupils. Can I trust the figures at all?

For headline progression rate alone — no, not directly. With only 2–3 autism-identified pupils, the progression rate is dominated by individual cases. The page acknowledges this and shows a "small cohort" caveat where it applies.

But if we show "Identification looks low" for a school with very few autism-identified pupils, that itself is the signal. The flag fires when the school's size and FSM band predict more autism identification than the school actually shows. A 250-pupil primary in the highest FSM band with only 2 autism-identified pupils is structurally unusual — comparable schools would typically identify around eight.

Triangulate with trust-level patterns (is this happening across the trust?) and Ofsted SEND-relevant grades.

How can a school improve on these figures, if it wanted to?

EHC applications are won on documented evidence. The school's SEN-response practice generates that evidence:

  • Planned, recorded interventions with outcome measures.
  • Regular review meetings (typically termly) with parents, with notes.
  • Clear baseline assessments — where the child is, and where they should be.
  • Evidence that ordinary SEN support has been tried and isn't enough.
  • Willingness to lodge applications, appeal LA refusals, and persist through the process.

Schools with stronger within-LA progression tend to do these things systematically. SENCo capacity and time are usually the limiting factors.

Does staffing really matter, or do schools with more EHC pupils simply have more staff?

Both are true, which is why this is a useful but careful signal.

Existing EHC plans do bring extra staffing into a school, so a simple "more staff = better SEND" reading would overstate the case. To test that, we ran a reverse-causation check: after controlling for deprivation, school size, local authority and the school's non-ASD EHC load, staffing still predicted both autism identification and autism-to-EHC progression.

The effect on identification barely changed after that control, which makes sense: identification usually happens before any plan brings extra funded support. The progression effect shrank by roughly a third, meaning some of the relationship is existing plans requiring staff — but about two-thirds of the association remained. That does not prove staffing causes better SEND outcomes, but it does mean thin staffing is a reasonable warning signal to discuss with the school.

Could this site get a school unfairly attacked?

It's a real risk and we've tried to design against it. Everywhere the site comments on a school, the language is descriptive and the interpretation offers multiple plausible readings — the aim is to prompt investigation, not to convict. We never assert a single cause. The "same LA, similar intake" comparison is the closest defensible peer pool we can construct from public data.

The underlying figures are also publicly available DfE data. seND Lens makes them more legible, but anyone determined could compute the same numbers from raw CSVs. We'd rather provide context, caveats and methodology than leave the public to interpret the raw numbers without them.

If you're a school and a figure here looks wrong, contact sendlens@proton.me. We will publish corrections, right-of-reply notes and methodology changes where warranted. If you're a journalist using this data, please also contact us before publication — there are caveats and context that don't always appear on the public pages.

Two things shape your child's chances of getting the right SEND support that don't appear on a school's page. The first is what the school itself is willing and able to do beyond identifying needs. The second is what your local authority is willing and able to fund. The figures we display sit inside both — and any single school's behaviour is partly a product of pressures the school doesn't choose. This page is about those pressures, and why they matter for your child.

Why progressing to an EHC plan is harder than it looks

Most parents assume that if their child has a clear identified need, the school will naturally want to apply for an EHC plan. Often it will. But the route from SEN Support to a statutory plan runs through workload, evidence, budgets, LA thresholds and legal risk. Those pressures do not show up neatly in any headline figure, but they can slow escalation and leave families carrying more of the burden.

What follows is not a list of failings by any individual school. The pressures below operate at most schools, most of the time. The question is how each school responds to them. Some hold the line on what their pupils need; some don't. The figures on the schools tab are an indirect read on that question.

Start with capacity and incentives

Before any of the specific disincentives below, there is a basic capacity problem. SEND support takes adult time, specialist input, paperwork, review meetings and sometimes physical adaptations. In a tight budget, all of that competes with other school priorities.

  • A non-SEND pupil is usually the simplest to fund from the school's core per-pupil allocation.
  • A SEN-Support pupil may need extra adult time, interventions, outside advice or adapted resources. Schools are expected to meet ordinary SEN Support from their existing budget, including the notional SEN budget. That is not a ringfenced pot sitting next to each child; it is a way of describing what schools are expected to fund before additional LA top-up comes into play.
  • An EHC-plan pupil brings a statutory plan and, where agreed, top-up funding from the LA. That can help, but it also brings more administration, annual reviews, legally specified provision and sometimes costs that the top-up does not fully cover.

None of that means schools are excused from meeting needs. It means low EHC progression should be read inside a real set of pressures. Some schools hold the line and escalate when they should; others absorb, delay, ration or avoid. The figures on the schools tab are one indirect way of seeing which pattern may be operating.

Why this matters for your child — and why it isn't an excuse. The disincentives below explain why schools struggle to progress pupils to EHC plans. They do not excuse the impact: for a SEND parent at one of these schools, the disincentives translate into specific, measurable things — thinner classroom support, longer waits for assessment, fewer hours of TA time, slower escalation when ordinary support isn't enough, and in the worst cases pressure to move your child to a different school. Understanding the mechanisms helps you ask better questions in any conversation with the school. It also means not taking the school's framing at face value: phrases like "we don't think an EHC is needed" or "we're providing everything we can" often have one of the disincentives below behind them. Your child is entitled to support that meets their needs, regardless of which mechanism is in play at any individual school.

The workforce constraint

Almost every disincentive below has the same operational bottleneck behind it: workforce. EHC applications take SENCo time. Assess-Plan-Do-Review cycles take SENCo and teacher time. Documented interventions require teaching-assistant hours. The Code of Practice's "best endeavours" duty translates, in practice, into TA time and SENCo time. If those aren't there, the rest of the system can't function — regardless of intent.

Our school-level workforce analysis supports that structural point. Across more than 14,000 primary schools, staffing-density measures independently predict autism identification after controlling for deprivation, school size and local authority. For EHC progression, the association is stronger: in the conversion frame, better-staffed schools progress more identified autistic pupils to EHC plans even after adding a control for existing non-ASD EHC pupils. Roughly a third of the staffing-progression association appears to be reverse causation — existing plans bringing staff into the school — but the remaining signal persists. This is observational, not proof of causality, but it makes workforce a serious capacity signal rather than background context.

The 2024 DfE School Workforce Census shows three things worth knowing:

  • SENCo capacity has not grown with demand. EHC needs-assessment requests are up around 72% since 2020; SENCo posts and SENCo time allocation have not risen anywhere close to that. Around 85% of SENCos have no administrative support. In smaller primaries the SENCo role is typically a one- or two-day-per-week add-on to a teaching post.
  • Teaching-assistant numbers are under pressure. TAs are the dominant cost on which schools cut when budgets tighten — they're easier to reduce than teaching posts, and many are on term-time-only contracts with shorter notice. Several years of real-terms budget pressure have produced significant TA-FTE attrition in primary schools, particularly those serving more deprived intakes.
  • The adults-per-pupil ratio is one useful public signal of SEND capacity. Schools with stronger SEND capacity often have more non-teaching adults (TAs, learning mentors, support staff) relative to their pupil roll. Schools that are budget-defensive on SEND can be teacher-heavy and TA-thin.

You can see how your school sits on staffing figures on the school's page itself, under the "School staffing" detail card — three ratios benchmarked against same-LA same-FSM-band peers. A school in the bottom quarter for pupils-per-adult (i.e. well-staffed) is structurally better-placed to deliver SEND support than one in the top quarter (thin staffing), even before any individual disincentive is considered.

Within the workforce frame, the specific disincentives are these:

1. The notional-budget mindset

The mechanism. The notional SEN budget is often described in relation to the first roughly £6,000 of additional support, but that figure is easy to misunderstand. It is not a protected per-child allowance. In practice, some schools treat significant SEN Support spending as a budget risk, so support stays deliberately modest: a few hours of TA time, no commissioned specialist input, no expensive resources or environmental adaptations. The school can honestly say it is providing SEN Support; what may be missing is provision at the level that would show ordinary support is no longer enough.

What this means for your child. A school operating this way will have low EHC progression rates not because of a documentation problem but because the underlying support is being held artificially light. Your child gets thin classroom adjustments, no escalation to a formal plan, and no LA top-up funding — and the school will be able to point to a SEN-Support entry on the register as evidence that "they're being supported".

2. The 'managed move' alternative — encouraging children to go elsewhere

The mechanism. Where supporting a SEND child would require resource the school doesn't want to deploy, some schools work quietly to encourage the family to move on rather than to escalate provision. This isn't always exclusion in the formal sense. It can look like a sequence of phone calls about behaviour, suggestions that "another school might suit better", repeat off-the-record meetings about whether the child is "happy here", referral to alternative provision, or simply pressure that builds until the family withdraws. The DfE refers to one variant as "off-rolling" — removing a pupil from the school roll in ways that aren't formally recorded as exclusions. Ofsted has flagged this pattern repeatedly.

What this means for your child. The EHC application that would have triggered top-up funding never happens — because by the time the application would be made, your child is no longer there. From the original school's perspective, the cost has been removed; from your child's perspective, so has the relationship, the routine, and the support. The exclusions strip on a school's page is partly a signal of this dynamic — total removal rates (suspensions + permanent exclusions) tend to run higher at schools that take this route, including for pupils whose underlying difficulty was a recognised neurodevelopmental need.

3. The SENCo workload tax

The mechanism. Around 85% of SENCos have no administrative support. In smaller primaries the SENCo role is often a one- or two-day-per-week add-on to a teaching post. A single EHC needs assessment application typically takes 20–40 hours of SENCo time — gathering evidence from class teachers, securing input from external professionals who are often hard to reach, writing the application against the LA's template, and following through on requests for more information. EHC needs assessment requests have risen 72% since 2020 with no proportional rise in SENCo capacity. Each existing EHC plan then requires a statutory annual review, in perpetuity. A school with 30 plans has 30 annual reviews on top of any new applications.

What this means for your child. Even where the SENCo agrees an EHC application is the right call, the work to make it happen sits behind a queue. Many parents experience this as "the SENCo keeps saying we'll get to it" — and the SENCo isn't lying. They're triaging.

4. The LA refusal filter

The mechanism. Local authorities refuse around 25% of EHC needs-assessment requests at the assessment stage nationally; in the worst LAs the refusal rate is closer to 50%. A further 6% are refused after assessment. SENCos rapidly learn what their LA refuses and adjust their internal threshold for "should I apply for this child?" upwards. After five or six refusals, the rational SENCo response is to apply only for the cases they're nearly certain will succeed, which pushes the practical threshold well above the legal one. Research from UCL and from Special Needs Jungle finds SENCos report being told by senior leaders not to support parental appeals, on the basis that this would be "going against the LA".

What this means for your child. If your child's needs are at the borderline of what the LA will currently grant — which, given LA pressure on budgets, includes many children whose statutory entitlement is clear — your school may not apply at all. The refusal filter operates upstream of any formal decision, in the SENCo's own assessment of whether it's worth trying.

5. The "show your working" problem

The mechanism. An EHC application requires the school to demonstrate, with evidence, that it has worked through repeated cycles of Assess, Plan, Do, Review at SEN Support level and that ordinary provision is no longer enough. In doing that, the school exposes what its SEN Support practice actually looks like — how rigorous the interventions were, what outcome measures were recorded, whether reviews happened on schedule, whether parents were genuinely involved. Schools whose SEN Support has been thin or inconsistent face a perverse trap: an EHC application both reveals the thinness AND fails on the strength of the application itself.

What this means for your child. The schools whose SEN Support is weakest are also the schools least likely to apply for EHC plans — because applying would surface the weakness. Persistent low progression alongside ordinary-looking identification is consistent with this pattern.

6. The funding gap — even after applying

The mechanism. The notional SEN budget is just that — notional. It is not a ringfenced sum the LA hands to the school. When a school applies for and receives an EHC plan, the LA's top-up funding is meant to cover provision above what the school is expected to provide ordinarily. But top-up rates vary by LA, and are not always set high enough to cover actual costs. Some schools have learned through experience that applying yields a top-up which still does not fully bridge the gap.

What this means for your child. Even where the financial logic looks like it should favour an application, the post-application reality sometimes doesn't. A school that has tried this once and come out worse off is less likely to try again.

7. The legally-binding-provision paradox

The mechanism. Once an EHC plan is issued, the provision specified in Section F is legally binding. The LA carries the duty to secure it but in practice the school delivers most of it day-to-day — TA hours, specialist input, environmental adjustments. If a school can't actually deliver what's written in the plan, it carries legal risk. Specific provision that parents fight for at tribunal — "1:1 TA for 25 hours per week", "weekly speech and language input", "occupational therapy six times a term" — is exactly the kind of provision schools fear being legally bound to.

What this means for your child. A school short on capacity has an incentive to push for vaguer wording in the plan ("appropriate support", "as needed") rather than specific hours. Vague wording is far harder for parents to enforce later. The most useful EHC plans are specific and quantified; many schools push back against exactly that specificity.

8. SENCo knowledge gaps and training

The mechanism. Surveys consistently find that newly-qualified SENCos report having received no formal training in the EHC application process. Many learn on the job, often by having their first five or six applications refused. Common misconceptions persist among SENCos themselves: that an EHC plan requires "severe" needs (it doesn't — the test is whether ordinary support is enough, not whether needs are severe); that the parent must make the request (either can); that an existing refusal stays on the school's record adversely (it doesn't); that EHC pupils count as a school performance penalty in league tables (mostly untrue).

What this means for your child. Misapplied criteria filter out genuinely-eligible children before any formal decision is made. If a SENCo believes EHC plans are for "severe" cases only, your child's "moderate-but-unmet" need won't be put forward — even though that's exactly the situation an EHC plan is designed for.

9. The tribunal pipeline

The mechanism. In recent SEND tribunal statistics, parents won around 99% of EHC cases that reached a full hearing — local-authority success at that stage is extremely rare. About 25,000 tribunals were registered in the latest reported year. The high parent win rate sounds like good news, but for a school that supports an appeal it means many months of additional SENCo work, often in an adversarial context. Many parents who would win don't appeal — disability, lone parenthood, working hours, mental health, English as an additional language all reduce the proportion of eligible parents who can make it through the process.

What this means for your child. If your school's progression rate is low and your LA is refusal-heavy, you may face a choice between accepting a no and going to tribunal. The tribunal is winnable. It is also genuinely exhausting. Parents who don't have the time, energy, or money to pursue it are quietly filtered out — and the LA, statistically, knows this.

10. The reputational worry

The mechanism. A school known for handling SEND well can attract more SEND families, which loads the SENCo more, raises the share of the budget going to SEN, and — perversely — makes the school's "% of SEN pupils" headline figure look high to prospective parents who don't understand it. Schools internally trade off "being good at SEND" against "becoming the SEND school in the area".

What this means for your child. Some genuinely-good SEND schools quietly under-promote their SEND work — meaning that even where you can find them, you may not see the strongest signal that they're worth choosing. Other-parent recommendation networks matter more here than any aggregated statistic.

Pressure flows downwards — EHC disincentives spill into SEN Support

The ten disincentives above are framed in terms of EHC progression, but most of them don't only reduce EHC applications. They reduce the quality of the SEN Support sitting beneath the EHC pathway — and that matters even for pupils whose needs would never reach the EHC threshold. The mechanisms feed each other:

  • The financial pressure that makes a school ration SEN Support (disincentive 1) is related to the pressure that can make EHC applications feel financially risky even after top-up funding (disincentive 6).
  • The SENCo workload that prevents EHC applications from being written rigorously (disincentive 3) is the same workload that prevents Assess-Plan-Do-Review cycles from being run rigorously at SEN-Support level — which then means weaker evidence-gathering (disincentive 5), which then means refused applications (disincentive 4).
  • The LA refusal filter (disincentive 4) doesn't only filter EHC applications. It's expressed through an LA culture that pushes back on the cost of any SEND provision — and schools learn to anticipate that culture in how they spec SEN Support too.
  • The training gap that makes SENCos cautious about applying for EHC plans (disincentive 8) leaves them less able to write strong SEN-Support plans either. The same gap operates upstream.
  • The legally-binding-provision worry (disincentive 7) doesn't only apply to EHC plans — schools wary of being legally bound by an EHC plan are also wary of writing specific commitments into SEN-Support documentation that parents could later cite back.

The practical consequence: where a school looks weak on EHC progression, it is reasonable to ask whether SEN-Support quality is also under pressure. The figures we show — identification rate and EHC progression rate — are two visible signals of a wider system. A school producing low EHC progression may not only be slow to escalate; the underlying SEN Support many pupils receive may also be thinner. So even if your child never crosses the EHC threshold, the school's response to SEN-Support needs is worth discussing directly.

This is the reason we surface school staffing data alongside the headline figures. If you can see that a school is in the bottom quarter of similar-intake peers for staffing density and the lower quarter for EHC progression, those may not be two separate problems: they may be two views of the same capacity constraint.

Why where you live can matter more than your school

The school's behaviour is half the story. The local authority is the other half — and the variation between LAs is far larger than the variation between schools. Six things to know.

The variance is extreme — and it isn't deprivation-explained

The statutory deadline for issuing an EHC plan is 20 weeks from the date of assessment request. Nationally, 46.4% of new plans were issued within 20 weeks in 2024. But the average hides extreme variance between LAs. In Lambeth, around 71.5% of plans are issued on time. In neighbouring Southwark, around 19.2%. That's a roughly four-fold difference between adjacent boroughs serving similar demographics. EHC refusal rates show the same pattern: some LAs refuse many times more needs-assessment requests than others. Deprivation does not explain the whole spread — wealthy and deprived LAs both feature among weak performers. Your child's needs matter, but the LA they live in can materially shape the route to support.

The Inverse Care Law

Children in the most deprived areas have EHCP rates of around 17.5% among the SEND-identified cohort. In the most affluent areas, the rate is around 22%. That is hard to explain by underlying need alone: autism, ADHD and dyslexia are not expected to be more common in affluent areas at anything like that scale. What does tilt toward affluence is the parental capacity to advocate: time, professional networks, knowledge of the system, ability to commission private assessments, willingness and resources to go to tribunal. The same child with the same needs may have a different chance of an EHC plan depending on whether their parents can take time off work to fight for it.

The Tribunal Paradox

This is one of the clearest facts about LA dysfunction. Published analyses estimate that local authorities spent over £153 million defending EHC tribunal appeals in the latest reported period, while parents won around 99% of cases that reached a full hearing. From a pure economic standpoint, granting more plans earlier may cost less than fighting and losing tribunals. The behaviour persists partly because the cost of fighting comes from a different budget line (legal services) than the cost of granting (the high-needs block), and partly because the tribunal route itself is a filter — many parents who would win simply can't pursue it. The route is winnable. It is also exhausting, slow, and unevenly accessible.

The statutory-override and the high-needs financial squeeze

This is one of the most consequential things happening in SEND right now, and many parents will not have heard of it. Since 2020, LAs have been allowed to keep their high-needs block deficits "off-balance-sheet" via a special accounting rule called the statutory override. Originally due to end in March 2026, it has been extended to March 2028 — the immediate financial cliff edge has been averted but the underlying problem has not gone away. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that combined DSG deficits could rise from around £6.6 billion at March 2026 to £14 billion by the time the override expires in 2028. The DfE has stopped entering new Safety Valve agreements (which previously bailed out LAs in exchange for tighter SEND spending), and has signalled it will absorb all DSG deficits from April 2028 onwards — but has made no commitment to bridge the two-year period in between. Nine in ten local authorities currently run a high-needs deficit, and the pressure on them to refuse more assessments, delay more plans, and tighten more thresholds is acute throughout the bridge period. In many LAs, a child with the same needs may now face a tougher practical route to an EHC plan than the same child would have faced in 2020 — not because the statutory test has changed, but because LA finances and administrative thresholds have tightened.

The volume paradox — demand up, threshold rising with it

EHC needs-assessment requests have risen 72% since 2020. Refusal rates have risen in parallel. This isn't an LA "getting better at filtering" — it's an LA raising the bar administratively in response to demand. The statutory test for an EHC needs assessment hasn't changed; the LA's interpretation of it has. Demand isn't being met by more supply; it's being met by tighter rationing.

The cross-LA inconsistency

A multi-academy trust spanning five LAs deals with five different EHC application templates, five different processes, and five different refusal cultures. A school's apparent "performance" on EHC progression is partly an artefact of which LA it sits in. This is why the comparison on the schools tab is within-LA, not across LAs: it's the only comparison that isolates the school's behaviour from the LA's. The cross-LA story is the bigger systemic one, but as an individual parent there isn't much you can do about it short of moving.

What this means for you

Three practical takeaways.

First, your school's behaviour is real, and it matters — but it isn't the whole picture. A school that progresses few autism-identified pupils to EHC plans may be doing so because of one or several of the disincentives above; the school's own intent is one factor among many. The within-LA comparison on the schools tab is the cleanest read on what the school is doing differently from comparable schools in the same LA. It strips out the LA-wide factors and leaves the school-level signal.

Second, your LA is probably more variable than you realise. Refusal rates, on-time rates, and tribunal behaviour vary far more between LAs than between schools within an LA. If you live in an LA with a high refusal rate and a low on-time rate, the school you choose matters less than the system you're operating inside. Knowing your LA's track record before any conversation with a school is one of the most useful pieces of advocacy preparation.

Third, the system is in a difficult moment. The statutory-override extension to March 2028 has averted the immediate financial cliff but not removed the underlying squeeze on LA budgets — DSG deficits are projected to roughly double in the two-year bridge period, and nine in ten LAs are already in deficit. The reform programme that follows may improve things — and may not. In the interim, the most reliable route to securing what your child is entitled to is still the same as it has always been: know your statutory rights (see For parents), build the documentation yourself if the school doesn't, find other SEND parents in your area who have navigated this, and use IPSEA, Contact, SOS!SEN and Special Needs Jungle as your knowledge base.

The figures on this site are a starting point for that work. They tell you which schools are doing more than the system's pressures would predict, and which are doing less. They don't tell you which school is right for your child — only conversations, visits, and other parents can do that. But they do tell you which questions to take into those conversations.

Sources