Keeping EHCP Annual Reviews on Track During a Leadership Change

When a headteacher leaves, everybody focuses on safeguarding, staffing and communication. Those are the right priorities for the first fortnight.

The thing that slips quietly in the background is annual reviews, and it is the thing your placing authorities will notice first. A commissioner who receives a late or thin review report draws conclusions about the whole school, and those conclusions affect referrals long after the leadership position has stabilised.

This article is about protecting the statutory work during a transition, and why it matters commercially as well as legally.

Why reviews slip during a transition

Rarely because anybody decided to deprioritise them. Usually because of how the work is structured.

One person held the schedule. In small settings the review calendar frequently lives with the headteacher or SENCo, sometimes in a personal spreadsheet, occasionally only in their head.

The chair of the meeting has gone. Reviews need somebody who knows the child, can speak credibly about progress, and can hold a room containing a parent, a caseworker and sometimes a solicitor.

Report writing is invisible work. It happens in the evenings and gaps, and it is the first thing to go when the days fill with crisis management.

Nobody is chasing the local authority. Reviews involve the placing authority as much as the school, and if nobody is following up, the process stalls without any single person having failed.

What must continue regardless

The statutory framework does not pause because a school is between leaders.

Every child with an education, health and care plan must have their plan reviewed at least annually, and within twelve months of the last review or of the plan being issued. Children under five may need reviewing more frequently. The school contributes; the local authority holds the duty to review and to notify its decision afterwards.

Reviews must be genuinely reviewed against outcomes rather than repeating last year's document. Parents and the young person must be able to participate. Reports must be circulated in advance of the meeting.

None of this is discretionary and none of it flexes with your staffing position.

The first week: protect the schedule

Do this in the first week of any leadership gap, before anything else related to SEND.

Find the review calendar and put it somewhere shared. If it exists only in one person's files, move it now. If it does not exist, build it from the plans, which will take a day and is the most valuable day anybody spends that month.

Identify anything due in the next term, and anything already overdue.

Name who chairs. It does not have to be the headteacher. It has to be somebody who knows the children and can speak with authority about provision.

Name who writes the reports and protect time for it in their week rather than assuming it happens.

Contact the placing authorities, tell them who is now leading, and confirm the review schedule with them. This single call prevents most of the damage.

Why commissioners judge you on this

Placing authorities cannot see inside your school day to day. What they see is paperwork, response times and how you behave at review meetings.

A thin annual review report tells a caseworker that provision may be thin. A late one tells them the school is not on top of things. A review that simply restates last year's outcomes tells them the child may not be progressing.

None of those inferences may be fair. All of them affect whether the next referral comes to you. From our experience, this is one of the most common and least recognised reasons referrals slow, and schools usually attribute the fall to price or to inspection instead.

Tell your commissioners about the leadership change yourself rather than letting them work it out from a delayed review. Handled openly, most respond supportively.

What an interim leader should pick up immediately

If you appoint an interim, this should be explicit in their brief rather than assumed.

Within the first fortnight they should have the full review schedule, know which reviews are overdue, have read the plans of every child due for review that term, and have spoken to the main placing authorities.

They should also look at quality rather than just timeliness. A school can be entirely up to date and still be producing reviews that would not withstand scrutiny at a tribunal. Ask the interim for an honest view of both.

Where the interim is new to the setting, pair them with somebody who knows the children for the first few reviews. Credibility in that meeting comes from knowing the child, not from a job title. See what to include in an interim headteacher brief.

Handover of individual children

The review schedule is the easy part. The harder part is everything the departing leader knew about individual children that never made it onto paper.

Which parents need a phone call before the meeting rather than an email. Which cases have a history with the local authority. Which children have a tribunal in progress or a recent one behind them. Which plans are known to be out of date but have never been formally challenged.

That knowledge leaves with the person unless somebody sits down and extracts it. Do it before their last day. See planning the handover from interim to permanent headteacher.

From our experience

Many leaders tell us they discovered a backlog of reviews only when a caseworker chased one, and that the backlog had been building for two terms before the vacancy.

We often see schools where the reviews were technically on time and substantively poor, which is the more dangerous of the two problems because nobody flags it until a parent challenges provision or an inspector reads a file.

Schools that protect this well usually do one unglamorous thing. The review schedule is visible to more than one person, all year, regardless of who is in post.

A common misconception

"The local authority holds the duty, so a delay is not really our problem."

The duty to review sits with the authority, and the practical consequences of a delay sit with you. Late or weak reviews affect the child first, because provision is not adjusted when it should be, and they affect your relationship with the commissioner second.

A school that keeps reviews on track through a leadership change earns credibility that is worth a great deal when it needs a favour later. One that lets them slip spends the following year explaining itself.

Questions for proprietors

• Where does our review calendar live, and who else can see it?
• How many reviews are overdue right now?
• Who chairs reviews if the headteacher is not available?
• Would our review reports stand up if a parent challenged provision?
• Have our placing authorities been told directly about the leadership change?
• What do we know about individual cases that is not written down anywhere?

Our perspective

Annual reviews are easy to treat as administration and they are not. They are the mechanism by which a child's provision is checked against whether it is still right for them.

When they slip during a leadership change, the cost is not primarily to the school's reputation. It is that a child continues for another year with provision that may no longer fit. Protecting the review cycle through a transition is one of the clearest ways a school can show that the children came first while the adults sorted themselves out.

Download our free resources

Our free downloads library includes an interim leadership handover checklist, which covers EHCP review schedules and individual case knowledge alongside the safeguarding handover.

How can Jarvis Education help?

We carry out EHCP quality assurance and annual review audits led by former His Majesty's Inspectors, and we place interim headteachers and senior leaders who understand that the statutory work does not pause for a vacancy.

If you are not certain how many reviews are currently overdue, that is the first thing worth finding out.