How do we benchmark our SEND register against other schools?

Start with your own numbers

Start by pulling your own SEN-support and EHC-plan percentages from your MIS, then compare them with DfE national figures (January 2025: 14.2%, 5.3%, 19.5% total) and, crucially, with statistically similar schools. Your management information system already holds the headcount you need; the SEN information report you publish each year is the other natural place those figures live, because Regulation 51 of the SEND Regulations 2014 requires it to set out how you identify and support pupils with SEN.

Work out three figures as a percentage of your roll: pupils on SEN support with no plan, pupils with an EHC plan (an Education, Health and Care plan — the statutory plan for a child’s more complex needs), and the two added together for your total identified SEND.

Set them against the right benchmark

The national picture from the January 2025 school census, published on 12 June 2025, is the headline reference point:

• 14.2% of pupils on SEN support (no EHC plan).
• 5.3% of pupils with an EHC plan.
• 19.5% with any identified SEND — around 1.7 million pupils.

Here is the part most guidance stops short of: the national average is a weak benchmark on its own. SEND prevalence tracks deprivation, so a school with a high proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals will sit above the average for sound reasons, and a low-deprivation school below it. The comparison that tells you something is against statistically similar schools — same phase, similar deprivation and prior-attainment intake. Use the DfE’s ‘Compare school and college performance’ service and your ‘View your education data’ account to find your similar-schools group, and check the local-authority EHC plan figures so you are reading your plan rate against your own council, not only England as a whole.

Read a gap as a question, not a target

A gap from the average is a prompt to interrogate your own identification practice — not a number to engineer toward. If you sit well above similar schools, ask whether you are over-identifying, or whether your graduated approach record is accurate. If you sit well below, ask whether needs are being missed. Either way, the honest answer is about the quality of your assess-plan-do-review evidence, and you can hand governors a defensible narrative rather than a bare percentage. Treating the average as a target to hit is the failure mode: it pushes schools toward gaming the register instead of getting identification right.

One reform-watch caveat. The SEND data picture is in flux. The Schools White Paper of 23 February 2026, with change proposed through the Education for All Bill, sets out a statutory Individual Support Plan duty and EHC plans narrowed toward the most complex needs by 2035 (no changes before September 2030, current plan-holders protected). These are proposals, but the register categories you benchmark today may shift, so date any comparison you present.

• See also what should be in a SEN information report and, for trusts, how to improve SEND provision across a multi-academy trust.

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