Draft EHCP Arrived? Exactly What to Check (and Your 15 Days)

Updated 4 July 2026 · Legal citations verified against legislation.gov.uk

After months of assessment, a draft EHC plan lands in your inbox. Relief first, then the small print: you have a window of at least 15 days to respond. That window matters more than most parents are told. Changing a draft takes a letter; changing a final plan takes an appeal. This guide sets out the rights the law gives you at the draft stage and exactly what to check, section by section, before the clock runs out.

Your three rights at the draft stage

Section 38 requires the local authority to consult you during the preparation of the plan, to send you the draft and to notify you of your rights. Regulation 13(1) then gives you at least 15 days to do three separate things:

1. Make representations about the content of the plan: additions, deletions and rewording, section by section.
2. Request a particular school or other institution to be named in the plan.
3. Require a meeting with an officer of the local authority to discuss the draft.

The authority must also advise you where to find information about the schools and colleges available. Note the words "at least": 15 days is the legal minimum, and the whole draft stage sits inside the overall 20 week limit that runs from your original request. If the covering letter does not state your exact deadline, ask the SEN team to confirm the date in writing on day one, then work backwards from it.

Requesting a school

Under section 38(3) you can request a maintained school, a maintained nursery school, an Academy, a further education institution, a non-maintained special school or an independent school or college approved under section 41 of the Act. Make the request in writing within your 15 days, naming the institution and explaining briefly why it can meet the needs set out in the plan. If you are still deciding, use your right to a meeting and ask the authority to point you to the information about available schools it is obliged to signpost.

Start with section B: is every need there?

Section B must describe your child's special educational needs. Read it with the assessment advice beside you; section K lists every report gathered. Work through each report with a highlighter and check that every need a professional identified appears in section B. The most common fault in draft plans is not what they say but what they leave out, and a need that is missing from B will almost never attract provision in F.

Watch for watering down too. If the educational psychologist described a significant difficulty and the draft says your child "can sometimes find things tricky", flag it in your representations and quote the report and page it came from.

The golden rule: B and F must mirror each other

Every need in section B must have matching provision in section F. The cleanest way to test this is a two column table: list each need from B on the left and the provision from F that answers it on the right. Any row with an empty right hand column goes straight into your representations. Needs in B without provision in F are promises without delivery, because under section 42 the local authority is only required to secure what section F actually says.

Is section F specific, detailed and quantified?

Long established case law and the SEND Code of Practice require the provision in section F to be specific, detailed and quantified: what will be provided, how often, for how long and delivered by whom, with what expertise. As you read each line of F, hunt for the escape words: "access to", "opportunities for", "regular", "as appropriate" and "will benefit from". Wording like that cannot be measured, so it cannot be enforced. Our guide to what good section F provision looks like shows weak and strong wording side by side, with the questions every line should answer.

Check the outcomes in section E

Outcomes are what all the provision is supposed to achieve, and they are the yardstick used at every annual review for the life of the plan. A meaningful outcome is specific enough that in a year's time the review meeting could say yes or no to whether it was met. If an outcome in the draft is so broad that nobody could ever say it failed, ask for it to be rewritten and propose the wording yourself.

How to send your representations

• Put everything in writing, within the deadline, and keep dated copies of what you send.
• Number each request and anchor it to evidence: "Section B, paragraph 3: add [need], as identified in the educational psychology advice, page 6."
• Ask for wording, not sympathy. Propose the exact sentence you want inserted; it is far harder to refuse a concrete sentence than a general complaint.
• If your changes are substantial, require a meeting as well. The meeting does not replace written representations; it reinforces them.

If the final plan arrives with the problems unfixed, you do not have to accept it. The needs in section B, the provision in section F and the school in section I can all be appealed to the SEND Tribunal under section 51(2)(c), and our guide to appealing the contents of an EHC plan explains how. But the draft window is the fast, free chance to get the plan right, and a precise, evidence anchored set of representations often does exactly that.

Frequently asked questions