Elective home education and EHCP: what families need to know

If your child has an Education, Health and Care Plan, you can home educate them. The plan does not disappear when you deregister. The local authority's duty to maintain it continues. What changes is where the special educational provision is delivered, and whether the LA is still under a duty to arrange it.

For most EHCP families, deregistration follows the standard process

If your child currently attends a mainstream school, deregistration works the way it does for any family. You write to the headteacher, and under Regulation 13 of the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024 the school must remove your child from the admission register on receipt of that letter. The headteacher has no authority to refuse, delay, or impose conditions. Having an EHCP does not change that procedure. The full step-by-step is covered in our guide to taking your child out of school to home educate.

There is one specific exception, and it is narrower than parents are often told.

The EHCP does not stop applying when you home educate

Deregistering changes where your child is educated. It does not change the legal status of the plan.

The DfE 2019 guidance is explicit on this point. The local authority's duty to maintain the EHCP continues. The annual review continues. Your statutory rights of appeal to the SEND Tribunal continue. What changes is administrative: the plan should be updated to reflect that the parents have made their own arrangements under section 7 of the Education Act 1996, and the named placement is updated accordingly.

If your child currently has an EHCP, that document is still the legal record of their needs and the provision they have been assessed as requiring. Home educating does not erase any of that. It does not require you to start the assessment process over. It does not move you outside the SEND system.

The LA's duty to arrange provision becomes conditional after deregistration

This is the part of the system that most affects families in practice, and it is the part that practitioner sites and charity helplines often soften. It is worth setting out plainly.

Paragraph 5.21 of the DfE 2019 guidance describes the legal mechanism. When a child has an EHC plan, the local authority's duty to arrange the provision specified in the plan applies only if the parents have not arranged for the child to receive a suitable education in some other way. If the home education is suitable, the local authority has no duty to arrange the special educational provision for the child. The plan should state that the parents have made their own arrangements under section 7. The authority continues to check suitability under sections 436A and 437 of the Education Act 1996, and if at any point it considers the home education is no longer suitable, the duty to arrange the provision returns.

In plain terms: deregistration moves your child out of the LA-arranged provision system into the parent-arranged provision system. The plan still exists. The LA still has to maintain it. But the LA is no longer under a duty to deliver the provision listed in it, for as long as it considers your home education suitable.

In our conversations with home-educating SEND families, this is the structural fact behind what most families experience as "the funded provision conversation" with their LA. It is not a discretionary negotiation, and it is not the LA being unreasonable. It is the law working as written. Knowing that does not make the conversation easier, but it does mean you can engage with it from understanding rather than fear.

Suitability is checked, not inspected

Sections 436A and 437 of the Education Act 1996, summarised in the DfE 2019 guidance, set out how the LA continues to satisfy itself that home education is suitable. Section 436A is the LA's duty to identify children of compulsory school age who are not receiving a suitable education. Section 437 is the enforcement mechanism that activates if the LA has serious, evidenced concerns about suitability. The s.437 process begins with written notice and, only as a last resort, a School Attendance Order.

For an EHCP family, the same two sections do the same legal work as for any home-educating family, with one practical difference: the LA's view of suitability for a child with an EHCP draws on a wider evidence base. The plan itself describes what the child needs, and the LA's assessment of whether home education is meeting those needs is informed by it. In practice, this can mean more correspondence and more requests for information than for a non-EHCP home-educating family. It does not mean a different legal test.

Practice varies by LA. Your local authority's published EHE policy is the place to start; GOV.UK's contact your local council tool will take you to it. Your LA may differ in tone and process from another LA a few miles away. The underlying legal framework is the same.

EHCP families take a few extra practical steps when deregistering

If you are still researching, none of these steps need to happen yet. They become live once you have decided to deregister.

Write to the local authority at the same time as the school

The standard deregistration letter goes to the headteacher. For an EHCP family, send a parallel letter to the local authority's elective home education team, copying in the SEND team if your area separates them. This is not legally required, but it shortens the gap between deregistration and the LA's first response, and it puts your position on record from day one.

Ask explicitly what happens next to the plan and the provision

The two questions worth putting in writing are: what is the LA's process for updating the plan to reflect the home education arrangement? and what arrangements, if any, will continue under the plan after the home education starts? Asking these directly, in writing, prevents the slow-drift conversation in which provision quietly stops appearing without anyone formally addressing it.

Engage with the next annual review

The annual review is the structured moment where the plan is reconsidered. It continues after deregistration. Treat it as the most important meeting in the calendar. Bring evidence of how the home education is meeting the needs the plan describes. Bring questions about anything in the plan that has changed, drifted, or stopped happening.

Keep a written record

Letters sent and received, dates of phone calls, summaries of meetings, notes of what was agreed. This is the same advice every SEND parent has heard a hundred times before, and it is repeated here because it remains the single most important habit if a disagreement later emerges.

For case-specific legal advice, go to the named SEND legal advisers

This article is general guidance, not legal advice for any individual situation. For case-specific questions about your child's EHCP, your LA's actions, or your rights of appeal, the two organisations to contact are IPSEA and Child Law Advice (Coram Children's Legal Centre). Both run advice lines staffed by people with the specific legal training to advise on individual SEND cases.

Home education moves the support, it does not take it away

The legal picture is more contained than it can feel at 11pm on the day a deregistration letter is being drafted. An EHCP does not stop you home educating, and home educating does not invalidate the EHCP. For most EHCP families, deregistration follows the standard process. For the narrow group of families whose child currently attends an LA-arranged special school, the LA must agree to the deregistration first. After deregistration, the plan remains in force and the LA's duty to maintain it continues. The LA's duty to arrange the provision specified in the plan becomes conditional on whether the home education is suitable.

The school system has spent years training you to associate the school with the support. The teaching assistant in the classroom; the specialist sessions on a Wednesday afternoon; the speech and language slots; the whole architecture of the EHCP delivered by people other than you. If you fought hard to put that architecture together, the prospect of dismantling it can feel like a betrayal of every battle that produced it.

Home educating does not dismantle the EHCP. It moves the locus of the support. The legal rights are the same. The plan is the same. The LA is still required to maintain it. What changes is who is doing the day-to-day delivery, and what relationship you have with the LA about it. That is a different relationship with the same set of legal rights, not a smaller set of rights inside a different relationship.

Sources

• Education Act 1996, Section 7. Parental duty to secure an efficient, suitable, full-time education. legislation.gov.uk
• Education Act 1996, Section 436A. Local authority duty to identify children of compulsory school age not receiving suitable education. legislation.gov.uk
• Education Act 1996, Section 437. Local authority enforcement mechanism (School Attendance Orders). legislation.gov.uk
• School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024, Regulation 13. Mandatory removal from the school register on notification of home education. legislation.gov.uk
• Department for Education: Elective Home Education, Guidance for Parents (April 2019), paragraph 4.3. The narrow LA-permission exception for children currently attending an LA-arranged special school. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
• Department for Education: Elective Home Education, Guidance for Parents (April 2019), paragraph 5.21. The conditional nature of the LA's duty to arrange provision specified in the EHC plan. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
• GOV.UK: Home education. gov.uk/home-education
• GOV.UK: Contact your local council about home schooling. gov.uk/home-schooling-information-council
• IPSEA (Independent Provider of Special Education Advice). Specialist advice line for individual EHCP and SEND cases. ipsea.org.uk
• Child Law Advice (Coram Children's Legal Centre). Authoritative secondary source on home education law and SEND rights. childlawadvice.org.uk