What should be in Section F of an EHC plan?

L v Clarke and Somerset County Council [1998] ELR 129: Where special educational provision is set out in Part 3 of the Statement (now Section F of an EHC plan) it must be specific, which will normally involve specifying the number of hours of support.

C v Special Educational Needs Tribunal and London Borough of Greenwich [1999] ELR 5: An LA must make decisions about provision when writing a Statement (now an EHC plan), and cannot delegate this responsibility to someone else, such as a school. (For example, the EHC plan should not say anything like “Support to be determined by the setting”.)

E v Rotherham MBC [2002] ELR 266, [2001] EWHC Admin 432: A Statement (now an EHC plan) cannot provide for provision to be amended unilaterally by the LA. In this case, the Statement said provision could be changed during the year following a ‘formal discussion’. This was not acceptable – any change to a Statement or an EHC plan should follow a proper process (e.g. annual review) so that the parents have a right of appeal.

R v Cumbria County Council ex parte P [1994] ELR 337: Simply referring to a financial banding or an amount of money to describe what special educational provision will be made in Part 3 of a Statement (now Section F of an EHC plan) is not specific enough to satisfy the law’s requirement.

Staffordshire County Council v JM (SEN) [2016] UKUT 246 (AAC): Transport is generally not special educational provision and should not usually be included in Section F of the EHC plan.

Worcestershire County Council v SE [2020] UKUT 217 (AAC) and London Borough of Redbridge v HO (SEN) [2020] UKUT 323 (AAC): These linked cases considered how specific an EHC plan should be, and provided a series of general principles to be followed in order to achieve practical and enforceable plans.