ESSEX County Council is set to spend almost £3 million to improve its struggling special needs department, where the majority of children are not getting their needs assessed within the statutory time period reports the Local Democracy Reporter.

In March 2024, 99 per cent of special needs assessments, known as Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCPs), were issued late in Essex. The average EHCP completion time was 46 weeks, more than double the statutory deadline of 20 weeks. 

The county council says the delays were largely due to the insufficient capacity of educational psychologists to handle a sharp rise in assessment requests following the pandemic, which resulted in a backlog of over 1,300 assessments.

It says “significant improvements” have been seen since external educational psychologists, provided by Liquid Personnel Limited and costing more than £1 million a year, started to be used.

It says the average completion of EHC Needs Assessments within the 20-week period in the academic year to date has risen to 30 per cent from just 1  per cent in March last year.

Liquid Personnel were contracted to provide 900 assessments by the end of June 2025.

Essex County Council says this helped reduce 70 per cent of the original backlog of 1,300. However, due to further demand and vacancies within the education psychologist service, the number of cases still awaiting allocation is 2,022.

Current forecasts show that 3,509 new assessments will be required from July 2025 to September 2026. This means that, including the backlog, 5,531 assessments will need to be completed.

Essex County Council has agreed a further £2.765 million in funding, just under £2 million in 2025/26 and £800,000 in 2026/27 – to pay for services from Liquid Personnel Limited to deliver a further 1,920 assessments at £1,440 each, over another year.

It says the remaining need can be delivered through other ‘existing or soon-to-be-delivered capacity’.

A statement as part of a decision agreed by Essex County Council cabinet members said: “The growing volume of EHCPs and vacancies within the education psychologist service requires the appointment of external associates to respond to this demand.

“Continuing to work with Liquid Personnel allows for the continuation of the ways of working established under current arrangements to meet the needs of children with SEND.

“Most notable of these ways of working is the implementation of a new cohort of assistant educational psychologists from September 2025 that will be recruited into vacant posts and therefore funded by a substantive budget.”