The EHCP Annual Review: What SENCOs Need to Track and When

Every EHCP annual review runs on a strict statutory clock. Miss a step, or miss a deadline, and it isn't just an administrative slip, it's a breach of the SEND Code of Practice, and one that can, and does, end up at tribunal.

For a SENCO juggling multiple annual reviews across a caseload, keeping track of who needs to do what, and by when, is one of the most demanding parts of the role. This guide sets out the full statutory timeline, in order, so you always know exactly where a review stands and what happens next.

The Legal Basis: What the Law Actually Requires

Every EHCP must be reviewed at least once every 12 months. This isn't guidance, it's a statutory duty on the local authority, set out in Section 44 of the Children and Families Act 2014 and detailed further in the SEND Code of Practice 2015.

Crucially, the 12-month clock doesn't measure from when the review meeting happens, it measures from when the entire review process is completed, including the local authority's final decision. That means the review meeting itself needs to happen well before the anniversary, to leave enough time for the steps that follow.

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The EHCP Annual Review Timeline, Step by Step

Step 1: Setting the Review Date

The review meeting should be scheduled with enough headroom before the 12-month deadline to allow every subsequent statutory step to be completed on time. In practice, many local authorities aim for the meeting to take place around 10 months after the EHCP was issued, or after the previous review, precisely because of what follows.

Anyone being invited to contribute, parents, health professionals, social care, should be asked to send in reports or information at least two weeks before the meeting, so it can be circulated to attendees in good time.

Step 2: The Review Meeting

The annual review meeting brings together everyone involved in supporting the child, the school, parents, the young person themselves where appropriate, and any relevant health or social care professionals. The Code of Practice is explicit that the child or young person's views, wishes and feelings must form an important part of the discussion, not a token gesture at the end.

The meeting should focus on:

• Progress towards the outcomes set out in Section E of the EHCP
• Whether provision is still meeting the child's current needs
• Any changes in circumstances since the plan was issued or last reviewed
• For Year 9 and above, preparation for adulthood, including independent living, employment and further education

Step 3: The Report Goes to the Local Authority

Following the meeting, a report is sent to the local authority. If anyone at the meeting disagrees with how the report reflects what was discussed, they should write to the local authority without delay, and within four weeks of the meeting, to have this addressed.

Step 4: The Local Authority's Decision (4-Week Deadline)

This is one of the two hard statutory deadlines to know cold. Within four weeks of the review meeting, the local authority must notify the parent and the education provider of its decision. The options are:

• Maintain the EHCP as it stands
• Amend the EHCP
• Cease the EHCP
• Carry out a re-assessment

This is an absolute deadline, not a target. A 2022 High Court judgment confirmed that this four-week timescale is a clear legal requirement, regardless of local authority resourcing pressures.

Step 5: The Final Amended Plan (12-Week Deadline from the Meeting)

If the local authority decides to amend the plan, there's a second statutory deadline to track. The final amended EHCP must be issued no later than eight weeks after the decision to amend, which in practice means no later than 12 weeks from the original review meeting.

Parents and young people are given 15 calendar days to comment on the draft amended plan before it's finalised.

Any delay beyond these statutory timescales is considered an undue delay under the SEND Code of Practice, and can be challenged.

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A Quick Reference: The Two Deadlines to Never Miss

From the review meeting

Statutory requirement

Within 4 weeks - LA must notify parents and school of its decision

Within 12 weeks - If amending, LA must issue the final amended EHCP

If you only remember two numbers from this entire process, make it these.

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Why This Matters Beyond Compliance

Tribunals frequently look back at the past one or two years of annual review reports as evidence, which makes each review far more than a box-ticking exercise. A poorly evidenced review, or one where deadlines slipped without explanation, can weaken a family's position, and a school's, if a dispute arises later.

This is also where the practical burden lands hardest on SENCOs. Tracking ten, thirty, or over a hundred EHCPs, each on its own 12-month cycle, each with its own four-week and twelve-week checkpoints ticking down from a different meeting date, is exactly the kind of coordination challenge that spreadsheets were never designed to handle well. We've written before about what the wider SEND workload looks like for SENCOs, and deadline tracking consistently comes up as one of the heaviest parts of the job.

Building This Into Your School's Process

A few practical habits make the annual review cycle far more manageable:

• Work backwards from the 12-month deadline, not forwards from today. Schedule the review meeting with enough margin for the four-week and twelve-week checkpoints that follow.
• Chase the local authority proactively once the four-week decision deadline is approaching. Local authorities are managing hundreds of reviews simultaneously, a school flagging an approaching deadline is often what keeps a review on track.
• Keep a single, visible record of every review's stage, whether that's the meeting itself, the four-week decision point, or the twelve-week final plan deadline, so nothing depends on one person's memory.
• Document reasoning at the time, not retrospectively. If a review's report needs to be referenced at tribunal a year later, contemporaneous notes are always more convincing than reconstructed ones.

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This is precisely why Senflow's EHCP tracker was built around these exact statutory checkpoints, giving SENCOs a live view of where every review sits against the four-week and twelve-week deadlines, rather than tracking dozens of individual timelines manually. If you're new to how this fits into the wider EHCP process, our guide on managing EHCPs from request through to annual review covers the full lifecycle in more depth.

The Bottom Line

The EHCP annual review process is built around firm, legally enforceable deadlines, not general good practice. Twelve months for the full cycle. Four weeks for the local authority's decision. Twelve weeks for a final amended plan. Missing any of these isn't just an administrative slip, it's a statutory breach.

For SENCOs managing this across a whole caseload, the difference between a smooth review cycle and a stressful one almost always comes down to visibility, knowing exactly where every review stands, without having to chase it down.

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Senflow's EHCP tracker keeps every annual review, deadline and piece of evidence in one place, built around the exact statutory timeline set out in the SEND Code of Practice. You can read the full SEND Code of Practice guidance on gov.uk for the complete statutory detail, or start a free 30-day trial of Senflow at senflow.co.uk to see how the tracking works in practice.

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