SEN Admissions

Special educational needs schools in Trafford don't take part in the normal Reception or Year 7 admissions rounds at all. Instead, a child is admitted because a named school is written into their Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) – a legal document produced by Trafford Council following a formal assessment of a child's educational, health and social care needs.

Getting an EHCP starts with a request for assessment, made by a parent, school or health professional. If the council agrees an assessment is needed, it gathers reports from education, health and social care professionals, then decides whether to issue a plan – this process is set out in law to take no more than 20 weeks from request to final plan.

Once a plan is being prepared, Trafford Council consults the schools that could meet the child's needs – usually including any school the parents have named as their preference. Each school gives its view on whether it can meet the needs set out in the plan, and the council considers this alongside parental preference before finalising which school is named.

The council must name the parents' preferred school unless it would be unsuitable for the child's needs, incompatible with the efficient education of other children, or an inefficient use of resources. Because the decision is about matching a specific child's needs to a specific school's provision, there's no ranked preference list, no oversubscription criteria and no single national offer day – each case is decided on its own facts and timescale.

Every EHCP is reviewed at least once a year, bringing together the school, parents and relevant professionals to check the plan's outcomes are still being met and whether anything – including the named placement – needs to change as the child develops. A change of school can be proposed at an annual review if the current placement is no longer the right fit.

SEN schools are organised around specific types of need – for example communication and interaction, cognition and learning, or social, emotional and mental health needs – and staffing, class sizes and therapeutic support are built around that specialism. This is why a place is matched to a child's individual plan rather than offered through a general application: the right school depends entirely on which specialism fits the child's assessed needs.

Because places are allocated through the EHCP process rather than a coordinated admissions round, ideas that matter hugely for mainstream schools – catchment areas, straight-line distance, published admission numbers and application deadlines – generally don't apply here in the same way. There's no single date to apply by; the process begins whenever an assessment request is made, and its pace is set by that individual assessment rather than a fixed academic-year calendar.