The Impact of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) on Children Looked After (CLA) and Children in Need (CIN): Pathways and Pitfalls of Improving O

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Children who come into contact with the care system areone of the lowest performing groups in terms ofeducational outcomes internationally (Sebba and Luke,2019). They also go on to have poorer employmentprospects (Hook & Courtney, 2011) and health outcomes(Dixon, 2008) than the wider population and are over represented in the homeless (Davison & Burris, 2014) andprison populations (Centre for Social Justice, 2015). SinceSeptember 2014, EHCPs were introduced for children whohave complex special educational needs and disabilities(SEND), which aim to improve some of these outcomes.Around half of Children Looked After (CLA) and Children inNeed (CIN) have an identified special educational need(SEN) and are much more likely to have an EHCP than allchildren (Nat. Stats., 2022).The aim of EHCPs is to coordinate the support for the childin a way that focuses on desired outcomes including, asthey get older, preparation for adulthood. If successful, thisshould lead to better outcomes for these children - a thesisthis PhD study seeks to test through a mixed methodsdifference-in-differences research design, using acombination of administrative data held by government,and advanced quantitative methods, complemented withan interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach. While thereis an emerging body of research into EHCPs (e.g. Ahad etal., 2022), no study has yet evaluated the impact of EHCPson children's outcomes - making this the first study of itskind.