Discover how Hertfordshire County Council has transformed their EHCP processes

“The Invision360 EHCP QA Tool has really helped us to think about what “good” looks like.”

Hertfordshire County Council is responsible for over 12,000 Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCPs) for children and young people with SEND in their area.

These plans identify any specific health, social, or educational needs for children and young people with SEND. They involve contributions from many people, including parents, teachers, health professionals, social workers, and local government representatives.

Between 2015-2023, Hertfordshire CountyCouncil saw a 223% increase in the number of children requiring EHCPs. This is a significant rise compared to a national increase of 140% and a 115% increase for statistical neighbours.

The growth in numbers meant that the Statutory SEND Service needed to change how they worked. The implementation of a new delivery model, called “Making SEND everyone’s business known as MSEB” has been a transformative experience. Through the creation of a more nuanced approach, the service have been able to deliver more specialist support underpinned by their innovative SEND Academy model.

Within its transformation, Hertfordshire invested in our Invision360 EHCP QA Tool. They wanted to find a new way of looking at EHCPs that would automatically grade each report while also removing any subjectivity. Along with real-time updates and deeper insights into key areas, the tool has supported Hertfordshire to transform their quality assurance processes.

Rachael Kennedy, Send Quality Assurance Team Manager, tells us more about the innovative work that they are doing in Hertfordshire and how children and young people are having their voices listened to through each EHCP report. ‍

Rachael, can you tell us more about your local authority and the challenges that you were facing?

“Our new delivery model has been incredibly successful, and it’s allowed us to bring in specialist insights into each report.”

Previously, we had one Statutory SEND Service responsible for the entire EHCP process. As you can imagine, it was a highly pressurised environment for the service, with huge numbers of EHCPs being managed by the service. We felt that this didn’t allow for specialist services to make the most of their expertise. For example, our virtual schools service were delivering excellent support to children and young people but weren’t necessarily involved within the EHCP processes.

Our new approach to SEND has changed this. We secured an investment and set up a significant workforce transformation programme ‘MSEB’ involving a range of key corporate colleagues to address these key challenges, develop a new operating model across the SEND workforce and build capacity and capability, with the aim of achieving a range of improvements. This involved a large recruitment campaign which focused on hiring staff with lived experience and/or transferrable skills.

We also redesigned our services by adding capacity to existing specialist services to benefit from their expertise and deliver statutory SEND duties etc. For example, we now have a dedicated team in place to focus on the initial assessments before EHCP’s are then managed by our specialist teams such as our Early Years Service (0-25), School Aged Statutory SEND Team(4-16), Young People’s Team (17-25) or our dedicated Access and Inclusion or Virtual Schools Team.  

This unique approach works well because it allows us to deliver more targeted, nuanced and specialist support.”

Where does your role sit into this new delivery model?

“As part of our integrated approach, we established a separate quality assurance team to confirm that our reports are fully independent. We want to be able to learn from best practice solutions across the whole of the social care sector. That’s why, in my role, I’m the SEND QA team manager, but I sit within Children’s Specialist Services rather than in the SEND teams.

Our social care team have been judged as “outstanding” by Ofsted, so it’s important to us that we can learn from them.”

Your team has expanded, can you tell us more?

"When the “Making SEND everyone’s business” model was first launched, I was solely responsible for focusing on SEND quality assurance.  

We now have a whole team which includes SEND practice development leads, who take the audit findings and provide training to colleagues in the specific areas that have been highlighted. We’ve also brought in a quality assurance and audit manager who specialises in SEND, as well as a project officer who handles the reporting and project management tasks.

This expanded team means that we can successfully manage more audits. But more importantly, it means that we can effectively implement improvements based on those audits. It allows us to work within a continual cycle of improvements, which is to the benefit of children and young people.”                                                                                    

As part of your new approach, you invested in the Invision360 EHCP QA tool. But what were your quality assurance processes like beforehand?

“Before we switched to the tool, we like many other local authorities were relying on a checklist before progressing into collectively using an Excel spreadsheet to make notes.

We managed in this way for about six months, before transitioning to the Invision360 tool.

Excel has its strengths, and there is a reason why many Local Authorities use the same reporting processes. After all, it’s readily available and simple to use by everyone involved.  

Managers from different SEND teams were conducting monthly audits on a sample selection of new EHCPs as part of their quality assurance processes. From those audits, I was then drafting quarterly reports to highlight any specific areas of learning that we needed to invest in.

While Excel spreadsheets are a beneficial tool to bring together copious amounts of data, they can be extremely labour intensive because we had to manually extract and review the data. We were concerned that it was increasingly complicated to interpret the rationale behind individual judgements. In our view, this was causing too much subjectivity within our EHCPs. Our Service Managers and Heads of Service were needing to get involved and moderate the reports to ensure consistency in the grading process. This wasn’t a sustainable option as it was taking up too much time, which could be better spent elsewhere. “ 

We wanted to find a solution that would allow us to delve much deeper into what actions we needed to take. For example, if a plan received an overall grading of “requires improvement,” we wanted to know which specific areas needed those improvements.

How did you learn about the Invision360 EHCP QA tool? What was the "aha!" moment that made you decide to use it?

“When we did the initial demonstration, I was really impressed with the fact that the tool automatically grades the work for us. It added that layer of objectivity that I was looking for. I had been concerned about the consistency within our gradings, and I liked the fact that we could see clearly what the criteria was for each grading. Within that, it was immediately clear that we could drill down into each specific section to see which areas needed improvement.

It solved the key frustrations that we were dealing with.

I was also pleased to see that there was a live, real-time tracking function which allowed me to see our exact progress at any moment. Excel doesn’t have that option, and if a Director of Service asked me about our EHCP progress, I couldn’t give an accurate answer until I’d reached the end of the quarter and had completed my reports.

Being able to see our exact progress at the press of a button has made everything so much easier and it gave us the push to make that transition.”  

What have been the clear benefits for you and your team at Hertfordshire County Council?

“Firstly, the impact on resources has been huge. It’s much less resource-intensive because we no longer need to create manual reports - all the information we need is readily available.

The impact on visibility has also been hugely beneficial. Other people in the team can access the information which makes it far more accessible when we make decisions.

But for us, the overwhelming benefit is that it has really helped us to think about what “good” looks like.

As a Local Authority, we have published good standards guidance. We’ve been able to share this with schools and settings and will shortly be publishing it as a public document for parents and carers.

We are thankful that the Invision360 tool has played a big part in the development of our good standards because its helped us to visually identify and articulate what “good” actually means and how to transfer that into consistency. It’s been a cornerstone in thinking about how to make sure that everyone is aware of what standards we should be meeting.”

Can you expand more on how this understanding has helped to improve your reporting?

“We began by encouraging SEND managers to use the tool, and from that we then included the tool in our SEND Academy Training programme for new recruits.

Being able to clearly define what “good” looks like has been essential, particularly as our training takes participants through each section of the report. Being categorised as “good” isn’t about ticking boxes – it’s about identifying which parts of the plan need to be improved.

As the tool allocates a grade to each section, it was much easier to define and improve those specific areas.

For example – at a fairly early stage of our journey, we identified that our social care sections could be improved. We noticed that often these sections were being graded as “requires improvement,” while the rest of the report was classed as good. By pinpointing those sections, we could identify that those issues were typically occurring when the young person had no identified social care needs. Either the wording that was being used by the plan writer wasn’t making that clear, or the section was being left blank.

The Invision360 EHCP QA tool has helped us to overcome these issues. We’ve developed specific wording to insert in those sections and created a new social care triage. It’s made us really think about what we need to add into every single part of our EHCP reports.

Improving visibility and understanding what “good” truly means has allowed us to drive forward our learning and improvement processes. As you would expect, we were not previously getting this level of detail and insight from our Excel reporting, so it’s been invaluable to get to the nitty gritty in specific areas.”

You’ve seen significant improvements in quality of your EHCPs over the last year, how has Hertfordshire County Council driven this using the EHCP QA tool?

“As mentioned, it’s really pinpointed the exact areas that need improvement. That has helped immeasurably, not just in what needs to be done, but it’s allowed us to hone in on our training.

We’ve taken everything back to the very beginning. Through our SEND Academy, we are teaching new starters on how to write good quality EHCPs. The Invision360 tool is playing a hugely important role within this training, and we’re really understanding what it means to make SMART targets.

To elaborate further, the Invision360 EHCP QA criteria for section E recently changed. Outcomes have to be "SMART" to receive that “good” grading. Unfortunately, we discovered that as a team, we were routinely struggling to meet that criteria. This allowed our Practice Development Leads to look into this more and co-produce further training on what we need to do to deliver SMART outcomes. This is not only essential for our EHCP reports, but it’s become an essential component of our SEND Academy training.

We believe that this strict criteria is invaluable because it means that we are not becoming complacent. Through our Practice Development Leads, we can constantly search for those areas where we can continue to improve. We have confidence and trust in our data, and our partners can see that our grades are based on set criteria.

If we don’t meet that criteria, we don’t meet the grade.”

Can you tell us about how you’ve used those individual section indicators to boost improvements?

“The criteria within the tool is extremely strict but that drives high standards.

What we’ve noticed is that if even one section requires improvement, the whole plan is flagged as such. This is important for continual improvements because we want to know the areas that need additional work and insight.

Where this tool shows its value over and above our previous Excel reporting system is that we can pinpoint precisely where those improvements are needed. Those insights allow us to act accordingly. We believe its essential to strengthen every single part of our EHCP reports. If we have individual sections of the plan that are graded as “requires improvement” then that’s not OK – even if the report as a whole is graded “good.”

Ultimately what we want is to deliver the best outcomes for children and young people, so we need to drive forward with continuous improvements and this tool is allowing us to do that.”

What can you tell us about how it’s changed your auditing process?

“Quality assuring our EHCPs is essential, and we use a mix of methods to make sure that our auditing processes are effective.

Our journey began by focusing intently on the new plans coming into the service. We believed that by getting that first plan right, it will be the most impactful for the child or young person.

Currently we are actively involving managers and leads across different teams in our auditing processes.

Each month, we assign audits and every half term, we host an in-person multi-agency audit conference. This allows us to bring in a variety of professionals (such as health, social care, SEND professionals, education psychology specialists, schools) and we sit together as a collective group and work our way through the audit with the Invision360 tool on the screen in a conference room. For us, this is crucial to improving the reporting processes, not just for our internal teams, but for everyone involved in the EHCPs.

There’s often a lot of discussion and frequent mentions of “Oh, I didn’t know that needed to be included.”

It’s become a real learning curve for everyone.

How do you plan to continue improving your audits?

“Now that we’ve had a year using the tool, we’ve seen some improvements in our EHCP reports. We feel ready to move on as a team, so from November, we will start to develop a process to review the existing EHCP reports in the same way as our new plans. This means that we can transition the impact we’ve seen into otherEHCP plans that are already in our system.

We have also piloted a programme where schools can volunteer to audit EHCP plans of children in their care. We hope that this will also have a significant impact. To do this, we’ve started educating them on the Invision360 EHCP QA tool and how it works. We’ve been able to show them what our audits look like, and we’ve continually returned to our overarching narrative of “this is what good looks like.”

It’s pleasing to note that there’s been some great interest so far. The feedback that we are getting is that they’re already thinking about their annual reviews and paperwork and how to align it with the Invision360 EHCP QA tool criteria.

This is great because it means that not only will EHCP plans be far more effective, but the annual reviews will be much more thorough. Ultimately, they’ll better represent the needs of the child or young person. This is what motivates all of us, and its incredibly exciting to see how we can really improve the multi-agency aspect of our work.

We’ve even begun to involve our parent carer forum into our audit processes, and again, it’s proving to be extremely beneficial as parents can understand how the EHCP is working.

In our opinion, having multiple people aware of what’s going on at any stage is a good thing. It shows the collaborative impact of our work and stops the auditing process from taking place in a silo in the background. It has been great to have some of the same people attending our multi-agency audits and speaking positively about the journey of our plans slowly improving.”

What would you tell another local authority that is thinking about buying the online tool?

“There are numerous benefits, especially in terms of resource utilisation. Excel works well, but it takes up a lot of time to manually find the data you’re looking for. This tool not only makes workloads far more efficient, but it helps you to make the most of your resources and is directly leading to clear improvements.

Ultimately, everything we do comes back to our overall goal. That is to improve the lives of children and young people.

We’ve been incredibly impressed with how easy it is to recognise which parts of an EHCP are not meeting the ‘good criteria’, and we’re continuously learning from those insights. Knowing that we can identify potential improvement areas, remove any subjectivity and streamline our workloads is a win, and being able to download real-time reports without any additional work is a real bonus.

I’d definitely recommend it to other local authorities.”

What’s next?

If your local authority is ready to bring consistency to quality assuring EHCPs, contact one of our helpful team today to get started with your free demo or have a chat about the tool.

Explore our tools:

EHCP Quality Assurance Tool
Annual Review Tool
Quality Health Advice Tool
PEP Quality Assurance Tool
Educational Psychologist Advice Quality Assurance Tool  

More articles you’ll like:

The EHCP Annual Review Process for Local Authorities
Setting Good EHCP Outcomes: How to write outstanding Section E EHCP outcomes every time
Case Study: Swindon Borough Council