How EHCP benchmarking supports quality improvement: Birmingham City Council's experience
For local authorities, understanding the quality of Education, Health and Care Plans is essential to driving continuous improvement and ensuring children and young people receive the support they need. However, assessing quality in isolation can make it difficult to understand whether local performance reflects wider national trends or highlights areas requiring targeted intervention.
Mehrnaz, the Quality Assurance Officer at Birmingham City Council, explains how Birmingham utilises our EHCP QA module benchmarking data to enhance the quality of its EHCP process.
Since implementing the Invision360 module in 2022, Birmingham has seen a clear improvement journey reflected in its benchmarking data.
The authority has seen:
- A significant reduction in Significant Gap plans
- An increase in Silver graded plans
Importantly, benchmarking has also helped Birmingham understand that improvement is rarely linear. Where performance challenges emerged, the authority was able to place these within a wider national context and understand whether issues were unique to Birmingham or reflected broader sector trends.
The section-level benchmarking data has been particularly valuable. By targeting specific areas of weakness, Birmingham has been able to monitor the impact of improvement activities over time.
For example, between Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 of 2025, improvements were observed in:
- Section E (Outcomes), with an increase in Gold gradings following targeted outcomes training.
- Social Care Sections D, H1 and H2, where reductions in Bronze and Significant Gap gradings indicated improving quality.
To learn more about why Birmingham City Council chose benchmarking to achieve these quality outcomes and how their efforts have been recognised by Ofsted and CQC, please visit our website to read the full case study.
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After spending most of his career working within local authority SEND Services as a Principal Educational Psychologist and Head of SEND and Inclusion services, Philip had first-hand experience of the challenges existing within SEND quality assurance. Knowing that technology could be the answer, Philip stepped out of local authority SEND leadership to start creating the Invision360 modules.
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