EHC Needs Assessment Request Letter Generator
In 2025, parents in England asked their council for an EHC needs assessment 162,702 times. Councils said no 43,300 times. That is more than one in four, and the refusal rate went up, not down.
Here is the part that should make you cross. When parents challenge those refusals, more than nine in ten get a result in their favour. So the refusals were not mostly right. They were mostly a filter, and the thing that gets you through it is a piece of paper written the right way round.
A SEND consultant will write that paper for you for somewhere between £300 and £1,500. This tool writes it for nothing.
Who the letter is from and about
Where is your child educated?
What are you seeing?
Tick every area that fits. These are the four areas of need used in the SEND Code of Practice, so using them makes your letter land in the language the panel reads in.
What evidence do you already hold?
Your letter
Want to know when this changes?
The EHCP system is mid-change. The Fonagy review reports this summer, the SEND White Paper is still moving, and councils keep shifting what they will fund. If any of that changes what is on this page, I will tell you. That is all I will email you about.
Done. I will only email you when something here actually changes.
No newsletter, no selling your details, unsubscribe in one click. I email rarely and only when the law or the guidance moves.
Know someone stuck on a waiting list?
A free tool that writes the letter asking your council to assess your child, argued on the law they are supposed to apply.
Why so many requests get refused
Almost every refusal letter leans on something that is not actually the legal test. You will recognise them: the school has not tried everything yet, there is no diagnosis, progress is being made, needs can be met from the school’s own resources, come back in six months.
The real test is one sentence long. Section 36(8) of the Children and Families Act 2014 says the council must secure an assessment if it is of the opinion that the child has or may have special educational needs, and that it may be necessary for special educational provision to be made through an EHC plan.
Read those two “mays” again. The bar is not “definitely has”. It is not “everything else has failed”. It is whether it may be necessary. Parliament wrote it low on purpose, because an assessment is how you find out. That is the whole point of it.
So the single most useful thing your request letter can do is name the test, apply it, and ask the council to do the same. The generator above does that in the second section of every letter it writes.
You do not need a diagnosis first
This is the myth that costs families the most time. Special educational needs are defined by need, not by label. The SEND Code of Practice is explicit that identification is about working out what action to take, rather than fitting a child into a category.
If you are sitting on a two year waiting list for an autism or ADHD assessment, you do not have to wait for it before requesting an EHC needs assessment. Say in the letter that a referral has been made and what the wait is. That is evidence of need, not a reason to pause. If the assessment wait itself is the problem, NHS Right to Choose may get you seen sooner, and you can run both at once.
If your child is home educated
Almost every EHCP tool and template online quietly assumes your child is on a school roll. Ours does not, because a lot of you are here precisely because school did not work out.
The right to ask for an assessment sits with you as the parent. It does not depend on your child attending a school. A home educated child can be assessed, and can hold an EHC plan. If a council responds by telling you to put your child back in school before it will consider assessing, that is not the law talking, and the letter this tool writes says so politely and directly.
If you are earlier in that journey, start with deregistering a child with SEND or an EHCP.
If you have already been refused
Switch the tool above to the second tab and it will work out your actual deadline, because this is where families lose cases they would have won.
The deadline is set by rule 20(1)(c) of the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) (Health, Education and Social Care Chamber) Rules 2008: two months from the written notice of the decision, or one month from the date a mediation certificate was issued, whichever falls later.
Two things people get wrong. First, you usually need to contact a mediation adviser and get a certificate before you can appeal, though you do not have to actually go through mediation to get one. Second, the exception: if your appeal is only about which school or setting is named in Section I of the plan, you can skip mediation entirely.
Refusal to assess appeals are often decided on the papers, with no hearing at all. For a lot of families that is a form, a statement and a wait, not a courtroom.
Where to get free expert help
Use it, genuinely, and use it alongside this tool rather than instead of it.
- SENDIASS is free, statutory and exists in every local authority area. Search your council’s name plus SENDIASS.
- IPSEA runs free advice lines and the most detailed SEND legal guidance in the country at ipsea.org.uk.
- Council for Disabled Children publishes free plain English explainers of the statutory framework.
This page prepares a document and explains published law. It is not legal advice and nobody can promise you an outcome. What it can do is make sure the letter that lands on a council desk argues the right test, in the right language, with your evidence attached, which is the bit that is otherwise sold to you for hundreds of pounds.
England only. The system works differently in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Figures from the Department for Education’s Education, health and care plans statistics, published 25 June 2026. Checked 26 July 2026.
Already been refused?
The free tools above cover the deadline. If you want the full argument, The EHC Assessment Refusal Appeal Pack sets out the six reasons councils give and what is wrong with each, how to get your mediation certificate, form SEND35A, and model wording to build your grounds of appeal from. £39, against £300 to £1,500 from a consultant. Free help from SENDIASS and IPSEA comes first if money is tight.
More on this: everything we have on SEND, EHCPs and neurodivergent kids is gathered in the SEND hub, including the free EHC needs assessment letter generator.