1 September 2026
Following an investigation by Justify Foundation, the charity has written to the Secretary of State for Education and to His Majesty's Chief Inspector asking them to examine how Hertfordshire County Council completes Section I of Education, Health and Care plans — the part of the plan that records, in law, which school a child will attend.
The investigation began with a single case and widened as the same pattern surfaced elsewhere. Justify gathered and analysed officers' own written communications in six unrelated families' cases, involving five different officers across at least three teams, spanning April 2024 to June 2026.
Those documents describe, in the officers' own words, final plans being issued with a placeholder in Section I — usually the child's existing school, sometimes no school named at all — in order to meet the 20-week statutory deadline while the council's Provision and Placement Panel had yet to consider the parent's request for a specialist placement. The real decision was then taken later, by the panel, outside the plan and outside the statutory process for amending it. The parent was left to appeal to the Tribunal against an entry that, on the council's own account, was never a decision on the merits.
The consequence reaches beyond the six families. A plan finalised with a placeholder is still counted as issued on time — and Hertfordshire's improved timeliness figures were substantially the basis on which the government's Improvement Notice was lifted on 15 April 2026.
Justify has asked the Secretary of State to request an area SEND re-inspection of the Hertfordshire local area partnership under section 20(1)(a) of the Children Act 2004; to require the council to produce that figure for every plan finalised since January 2024; and to keep her powers under sections 496, 497 and 497A of the Education Act 1996 under review in the light of it.
Full press release here