Section F: the wording that makes support actually happen

First, the question you came here with

Now you can read the rest of this at your own pace.

The problem, in one example

The issue is almost never that your child's plan says nothing. It is that it says something that sounds supportive and commits the council to nothing.

It does not say how often, for how long, delivered by whom, or what "appropriate" means or who decides.

Same support. Completely different legal weight.

Before you change anything: one warning

Why the words matter

Section F lists your child's special educational provision. Under section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014, the local authority has a legal duty to secure that provision. Not to try. Not to arrange if funding allows. To secure it. If the school cannot deliver it from its own budget, the duty still sits with the council.

The SEND Code of Practice 2015, paragraph 9.69 says provision must be "detailed and specific and should normally be quantified, for example, in terms of the type, hours and frequency of support and level of expertise".

The leading case, L v Clarke and Somerset County Council [1998] ELR 129, asks whether the plan is so specific and so clear as to leave no room for doubt about what has been decided.

One honest caveat. That case is often quoted as though everything must be quantified, always. It has since been qualified: in Redbridge v HO [2020] UKUT 323 (AAC), the Upper Tribunal accepted that some flexibility can be justified where there is a genuine reason for it. So expect the council to argue flexibility, and expect that argument to sometimes be legitimate. Pick the lines where vagueness is clearly causing harm rather than demanding every word be numbered. You will be taken more seriously.

The section that gets therapy moved out of Section F

If the council has put speech therapy, occupational therapy or physiotherapy in Section G, the health section, or told you it is "a health matter for the ICB", this is the provision you need.

Section 21(5) of the Children and Families Act 2014 says that health or social care provision which educates or trains a child is to be treated as special educational provision.

Section G is not enforceable against the local authority in the way Section F is. If therapy helps your child access learning, and for most children it does, it belongs in Section F regardless of who delivers or funds it. "That is a health matter" is not, on its own, an answer.

Tonight's job: pick three

You do not have to fix the whole plan. You should not try. A request for fifteen changes is not fifteen chances to win. Councils faced with a long list tend to concede the two or three easiest and issue the plan. A short, specific, well-evidenced request is harder to refuse.

So tonight, do this. It takes about twenty minutes.

1. Read Section B, which lists your child's needs. Read Section F alongside it.
2. Find any need in Section B with no matching provision at all in Section F. Write those down first. A stated need with nothing against it is the strongest thing you can point to, because the council cannot argue budget about a hole it has already described.
3. Then pick the one or two lines where vague wording is causing real harm right now. Not the ones that irritate you. The ones where your child is going without.

That is your list. Three items. Stop there.

The three things every line should have

1. Type. What exactly is provided.
2. Amount and frequency. How much, how often, over what period.
3. Who delivers it, and their qualification or supervision.

A useful test: could a new teaching assistant, starting Monday, read this line and know exactly what to do without asking anyone?

Reference: the phrases that weaken provision

You do not need to act on all of these. Use it to check the three lines you chose.

Worked rewrites

How to find the recommendations in your reports

This is the hardest part of the job, and most guides skip it. Professional reports bury their recommendations. An educational psychologist report can run to twenty pages and the things you need are rarely in a tidy list.

Where to look:

• The final section, usually headed Recommendations, Conclusions or Advice. Start here, but do not stop here. It often leaves things out.
• Anywhere the report says "X requires", "X will need", "X would benefit from", "it is recommended that". This is where provision hides. Search the document for those phrases if you have it electronically.
• Any number. Frequencies, durations, group sizes, staff ratios. Highlight every one. These are what let you quantify.
• Any named approach, programme or qualification. These let you specify who delivers it.

Then find each one in Section F. Three outcomes:

• There and specific. Good. Leave it.
• There but vague. Candidate for your list of three.
• Not there at all. The strongest category. Provision recommended in advice the council commissioned, then not included, is the thing they most need to explain.

The question that makes them answer

If recommendations have not made it into the plan, ask this in writing:

The council has to respond to that. An unanswered version of that question is a poor position for them to be in later, and it often produces changes without further argument.

One thing this page will not do

It will not tell you what provision your child needs. That has to come from the professional reports. What your child needs is a clinical judgement and it belongs to the people who assessed them.

What this page helps with is the other half of the problem: the need is often correctly identified in the reports, and then quietly watered down by the time it reaches Section F.

Where to get free help

Please use these. They are free, expert and on your side.

• IPSEA, free advice line and the best SEND legal resources in the country
• SOS!SEN, free helpline and advice clinics
• Your local SENDIASS, which your council must provide and which must be impartial
• Council for Disabled Children, wider rights information

These services are oversubscribed, which is a real problem, but they are the first place to go.

This page explains how EHC plan wording works. It is information, not legal advice about your child's individual case, and it cannot take account of your child's circumstances. For advice on your situation, contact IPSEA, SOS!SEN or your local SENDIASS.