The special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) service at Buckinghamshire Council is feeling the pressure of an increased workload, a new report has warned.

Demand on the service is ‘continually growing’ in part due to an increasing number of requests for education, health and care plans (EHCPs).

An EHCP is a legal document that describes the special educational needs of a child or young person aged up to 25, which must be provided by a local authority.

An assessment of whether someone needs a plan can be requested by the young person themselves if they are over 16, as well as parents, teachers, doctors and others.

The number of requests made to Bucks Council for assessments for the plans in 2023/24 grew by 12 per cent on the previous year, to reach 7,003, according to a new report presented to the council’s standards and general purposes committee.

Committee members cited the national shortage of educational psychologists (EPs) as one of the reasons for outstanding EHCP requests.

An EP’s role in the EHCP process is to assess and define what the child or young person’s needs are.

The council’s head of information governance and complaints Jennifer Griffin told the committee that Bucks was not the only local authority facing a shortage of EPs.

She said: “With regards to the educational psychologists problem, it is a national issue and a lot of the complaints in that area relate to the wait for those EHCP assessments as to whether they go past the first assessment stage.”

The report said that the council’s children’s services received a total of 262 complaints during 2023/24, marking a 22 per cent rise on the previous 12 months.

It read: “The SEND service remains under strain, as demonstrated by the 49 additional complaints, primarily concerning delays in EHC needs assessment requests.

“These SEND complaints represent 65 per cent of all complaints received by children’s services, up from 57 per cent the previous year.”

Griffin told the committee that the council was trying to use locum EPs amid the shortage and was aiming to ensure that children on the list for assessments are correctly dealt with.

The officer added: “Whilst we do uphold those complaints where there has been a delay because of the educational psychologists and delays with issuing EHCPs or the decision whether to issues one, we can put certain funding in place for those children in the meantime.”

The council said it recognised that the delays were part of a broader national issue for SEN, but that many complaints focused on the perceived lack of communication about delays.