There are a variety of publicly available datasets through gov.uk and at a local level, some of which can be found here. Gathering these data points will give you the ability to estimate parameters such as the total number of children with an EHCP, the number of children with an EHCP as a proportion of the young population, as well as the caseload split across the various provisions by age and primary need for nearly every LA in the country. Expenditure and budgets are also available through S251 budget and outturn statements to estimate expenditures and unit costs.
This case study demonstrates how plotting graphs and seeing how you stack up (quite literally) against various metrics from publicly available data is a great way to visualise the outputs of benchmarking activities.
Graph 1 demonstrates an example of possible benchmarking analysis. In this case, a London borough wanted to study its historic caseload growth in more detail. By calculating EHCPs per capita, they were able to determine whether recent rates of growth were in line with population changes, and benchmarking these figures against other London boroughs and statistical neighbours gave them an indication of how they compared with similar local areas.
As shown in Graph 1, this exercise informed the local authority that caseload was growing faster than population growth. In addition, despite two London boroughs having a higher number of EHCPs per capita, their 2020-22 growth rate exceeded all three.
As a result, this LA anticipated that their EHCPs per capita could exceed their statistical neighbours in a few years’ time. This posed some questions that were important to consider in the next stages of the diagnostic.
