A £1.3 million investment into early years SEND services in Essex will help tackle the growing financial burden faced by taxpayers, the county council hopes reports the Local Democracy Reporter.

The money for Essex County Council’s SEND Improvement and Transformation Plan comes after it pledged almost £3 million in August to improve its struggling special needs department, where the majority of children are not getting their needs assessed within the statutory time period.

As of July 2025, Essex has over 15,000 Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) to manage, issuing an average of 120 new plans per month.

There are also over 28,500 children and young people receiving SEN Support.

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 that the delays were largely due to the insufficient capacity of educational psychologists to handle a sharp rise in assessment requests following the pandemic, resulting in a backlog of over 1,300 assessments. It said that “significant improvements” have been observed since the introduction of external educational psychologists, provided by Liquid Personnel Limited and costing over £1 million per year.

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’.

The scale of the problem has prompted the county council to develop a plan – including steps to develop and implement an early pathway of support for children with emerging SEND in early years settings, to develop and fund a county-wide resource to support Early Years settings to improve practice and to create eight, cost effective, best practice classroom models / sensory spaces across primary and secondary phases.

A statement as part of a decision set to be agreed by Councillor Christopher Whitbread – the finance portfolio holder – said: “Essex County Council (ECC) is committed to enabling and growing educational inclusion, equity and excellence for all children and young people. However, pressure continues to mount across the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system nationally, and Essex is no exception, despite a strong foundation of inclusion and partnership working. Families tell us that support can be slow, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate.

“Although we have significant strengths in early identification and mainstream inclusion, the system is not currently set up to meet the needs of the numbers of children and young people, in a timely and sustainable way.”