What are our duties at a pupil's EHCP annual review?

The local authority must review an EHCP every 12 months, but usually delegates the meeting to your school: give two weeks' notice, invite the required people, circulate advice early, and send a report within two weeks. The legal review duty itself sits with the council, not the school. It must review every education, health and care plan it maintains within 12 months of the plan being made, and within each later 12-month period (section 44, Children and Families Act 2014). What the council almost always asks the school to do is run the practical process around that duty.

The steps the council delegates to you

Under regulation 20 of the SEND Regulations 2014, the person organising the review, usually the head teacher, must carry out a fixed sequence of steps. For a pupil on roll, that is the school:

1. Give at least two weeks' notice of the meeting date to the parent or young person and everyone else being invited.
2. Invite the required people: the parent or young person, a school representative, a council officer where the council asks to attend, and health and social care where they are involved.
3. Gather advice and circulate it at least two weeks before the meeting, so nobody arrives unprepared.
4. Focus the meeting on progress towards the outcomes in the plan, not just on confirming the placement.
5. Prepare and send the review report within two weeks of the meeting, with recommended amendments, to everyone who was invited.

After that, the clock passes back to the council: it must tell the parent or young person within four weeks of the meeting whether it will maintain, amend or cease the plan.

The line schools most often get wrong

Running the meeting is not the same as owning the duty. The council remains legally responsible for the review process and for the final decision to maintain, amend or cease the plan. If your school cannot arrange or attend the meeting, the duty does not lapse: the council must step in and make sure the review still happens lawfully. The annual review is also a minimum. You, the parent or the young person can ask the council for an early or interim review at any time if needs change, for example when a placement starts to break down, and reviews must be held within tighter windows around key transition points. IPSEA sets out the full process at ipsea.org.uk/the-annual-review-process. It is also worth knowing the council's own duty at the review, so you can see exactly where your part ends and theirs begins.

Does the 2026 reform change this?

No, not yet. The duty above is live law in 2026. The 2026 Schools White Paper proposes a new duty on every school, nursery and college to create an Individual Support Plan for each child with SEND, and proposes re-assessing EHCPs at key transition points rather than reviewing them, with the threshold for a plan raised. None of this changes current law: the ISP and reassessment proposals are floated from 2029 through the Education for All Bill, and no change to EHCP support begins before September 2030. Keep running annual reviews exactly as above.

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