How do LAs keep the Local Offer up to date?

The duty, in one line

Review it continuously: the Children and Families Act 2014 requires LAs to keep the Local Offer under review, seek comments from children, young people and parents, and publish them with the reply anonymously each year. There is no fixed update interval in law. Section 30(5) of the Act only says the council must keep its Local Offer under review and may revise it from time to time. What turns that open wording into a real duty cycle is the feedback loop attached to it, not a calendar reminder to refresh the webpage.

First: actively seek comments

The council must seek the views of children and young people with SEND and their parents on the content, accessibility and development of the Local Offer (Regulation 56, SEND Regulations 2014). This is an active duty, not a passive comments box. In practice that means routes such as the parent-carer forum, a structured survey of Local Offer users, feedback built into the website, and engagement with local services and settings. A page that no one is asked about is not being kept under review in the way the law intends.

Then: publish the comments and your response

This is the step the website-maintenance framing misses. The council must publish the comments it receives and its own response, including any action it intends to take, on the website alongside the Local Offer (Regulation 56). The response has to be at least annual and anonymised, leaving out anything vexatious or anything that would identify an individual. So the test of an up-to-date Local Offer is not whether the content is technically current. It is whether you can point to the published feedback and the published reply.

Two ways of reading the duty sit behind most compliance gaps:

1. As a content task. Audit the pages, fix broken links, refresh provider listings once a year. Necessary, but on its own it leaves you non-compliant: an offer that publishes no comments and no response fails Regulation 56 even if every page is accurate.
2. As a co-production duty. A continuous cycle of seeking feedback, auditing content against what families say is missing, and publishing your response. This is what the SEND Code of Practice expects, and it is what an Area SEND inspection looks for.

Build it into governance, not just the webmaster's list

The Code of Practice treats the Local Offer as something prepared and reviewed in partnership with children, young people, parents and local services (Regulations 54 and 55). Keeping it up to date is therefore a co-production function. Anchor it to a named owner, a standing feedback route, and a once-a-year published comments-and-response cycle. You can cross-reference what the Local Offer must include when you audit the content, and what the Local Offer is when you brief members or partners.

One reform-watch note for planning. As of 2026 the s.30 Local Offer duty is unchanged and current. The Schools White Paper Every child achieving and thriving (February 2026) and the Education for All Bill propose a new Individual Support Plan duty and a narrowing of EHCPs to the most complex needs by 2035, with no changes before September 2030. State and apply current law now; the Local Offer review duty is not part of those proposed changes. For the wording itself, work from the SEND Regulations 2014, Part 4.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.