Rising Demand, Shrinking Capacity: Why EHCPs Need Intelligent Tools Now

The latest EHCP data makes for sobering reading. In 2024/25, 5.3% of school-aged children in England had an EHCP – up from 3.3% just five years ago. In the North West, that figure climbs to 6.4%. In some areas, like Liverpool, the rate has more than doubled since 2019.

This isn’t a blip. It’s a structural surge in demand that SEND teams were never designed to handle. And the consequences are everywhere: staff burning out, families waiting months, and councils facing eye-watering overspends.

A System Buckling Under Pressure

Let’s be clear – most SEND teams are doing heroic work under impossible conditions. But the system is showing cracks that can’t be ignored:

• Too few staff for too many cases: Recruitment and retention are in crisis. Caseloads grow, experienced workers leave, new staff need hand-holding, and capacity spirals downwards.
• Processes stuck in the past: Manual drafting, siloed records, and informal workarounds dominate. With this level of demand, that’s a recipe for inconsistency and delay.
• Quality under strain: Plans written at speed lack detail, outcomes, and evidence. That increases the risk of dispute – and families are already winning the vast majority of appeals.
• Schools overloaded: SENCOs are spending more time firefighting bureaucracy than working with children. Specialist placements are full, and high-cost alternatives are doubling.

Without radical change, the outcomes are inevitable: longer waits, more legal breaches, declining trust, and even bigger holes in already stretched budgets.

Why Intelligent Tools Are No Longer Optional

The instinct in public services is often to look for incremental fixes. But in the face of data like this, tinkering at the edges simply won’t do.

We need intelligent, scalable tools that directly cut through the bottlenecks – and that’s where EHCP Plus comes in.

This isn’t theory. Councils are already proving what’s possible:

• From 6 hours to 1: EHCP Plus turns a full day of drafting into a one-hour review. Staff drag and drop professional reports, and within minutes a structured draft – aligned to the Code of Practice and statutory standards – is ready.
• Consistency without losing individuality: Plans reflect national standards but are still shaped by professional judgement. The AI provides a strong starting point; the human adds the nuance.
• Support for staff at every level: For new caseworkers, it’s a digital coach. For experienced staff, it’s an efficiency booster. For leaders, it provides oversight on workload and progress.

The result? More time for co-production, quality assurance, annual reviews, and transition planning – the real work that changes lives.

Meeting the Moment

Founders of EHCP Plus have set themselves a mission: to save 50,000 days of caseworker time. That’s not a nice-to-have – it’s a necessity if councils are to have any chance of meeting rising demand without breaking their workforce.

Councils that act now can:

• Reduce backlogs and statutory breaches
• Free staff to focus on children, not paperwork
• Build consistency in plan quality despite high turnover
• Restore trust with families and communities

Those that delay adoption face the opposite: worsening deficits, more appeals, and reputational damage that will be hard to recover from.

The Choice Is Clear

The data leaves no room for complacency. EHCP demand will continue to rise. Staffing pipelines won’t magically fix themselves. And the cost of failure – financial, social, and human – is already too high.

Intelligent tools like EHCP Plus are not about replacing people – they’re about giving professionals the time and headspace to do their jobs properly.

The question for local authority leaders isn’t whether you can afford to innovate. It’s whether you can afford not to.

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