CASE STUDY ยท EHCP TIMELINESS
800 cases waiting.
A 12-week route to fix it.
A county council's EHC needs assessment timeliness had fallen below 10%. We found where officer time was going, and agreed a plan to put it back into children's plans.
Objectives and impact
We were commissioned to find out why the backlog was growing, and how to reverse it as quickly as possible.
OBJECTIVE 01
Find where officer time goes, and where cases stall.
IMPACT
49.6%
of officer time was spent on administrative tasks, including trackers, data entry and parent correspondence.
OBJECTIVE 02
Identify opportunities to improve timeliness and reduce the backlog.
IMPACT
8 hours
saved per officer each week, from a single case hub with automated school chases and parent updates.
OBJECTIVE 03
Agree a plan the service can deliver, and track it from day one.
IMPACT
12 weeks
to a single source of truth and automated chasing, with a productivity baseline to track benefits.
How we did it, and what we found
Interviews and shadowing with team leaders and officers, mapped against the case data, showed where time went and where cases stalled.
Mapped the backlog month by month
103
assessments a month were added to the backlog, with drafting plans the bottleneck.
Counted the officers' trackers
Over 10
spreadsheets fed by hand from the case system, with no single source of truth.
Followed placement consultations
50%+
of mainstream school placements were delayed by push-back on needs and funding.