Build a Section 36 EHCP request pack for UK SEND parents
Section 36 EHCP pack in twenty minutes for £39
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A guided tool that drafts a parent's section 36(8) Children and Families Act 2014 EHC needs assessment request letter, stacks the school's SEN-support evidence (waves of intervention, progress data, professional reports) and produces a ready-to-send legal pack. It sits upstream of the SEND tribunal, at the moment a UK parent first realises their child needs an EHCP. 154,500 EHCNA requests were made in 2024, 35% refused at the front door, and 99% of refusals that reach tribunal are overturned. The 2026 White Paper preserves the statutory framework until 2029/30, so the window is open for at least four years.
The Story
Meet the user
Dan is forty-two, a self-employed plumber from Reigate with a seven-year-old daughter, Mia. Mia is in Year 2. Her teacher has flagged that she "isn't quite keeping up" in three parents' evenings running. The SENCo put her on SEN support eighteen months ago: extra phonics group, a coloured overlay, a once-a-week TA check-in. None of it has moved the needle. Mia's reading age is two years behind her chronological age, she comes home with cuffs chewed through, and last Thursday she hid in the toilets at break for forty minutes. Dan's wife has done the reading. She has read SEND37, joined three Facebook groups, downloaded the IPSEA template letter, and bookmarked Surrey's Local Offer page. She has also started crying in the car. They have agreed she'll request an EHC needs assessment. They have a blank Word document and the IPSEA template open in another tab. Neither of them knows what counts as "evidence". Neither of them knows what "waves of intervention" actually means, or whether Mia's last guided reading score is a data point or a wallpaper sample. They know they have to send something, and they know that if they get this wrong the Local Authority sends a refusal and the clock starts again.
She finds a tool called PaperPath in a Surrey SEND Facebook group at 10:30 on a Thursday night. She uploads Mia's last school report, the SEN support plan, two parents' evening notes the teacher emailed, a private SLT screening they paid for last year and a four-line summary of what's been happening. Eighteen minutes later there is a six-page section 36 request letter citing the right statute and the right paragraphs of the SEND Code of Practice, an evidence index that maps every claim to a numbered exhibit, a "waves of intervention" table populated from the school's SEN-support plan, a six-week deadline tracker, and a polite covering email addressed to Surrey's SEN team. She pays £39 for the pack. For the first time since September she goes to bed before midnight.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
8.2/10
154,500 EHCNA requests in 2024, 35% refused at front door, EHCP-active population 638,700 and rising 10.8% YoY. Search demand exceeds 55,000 queries a month across the cluster.
Parents pay £252 for one solicitor-drafted letter, £1,000 to £1,500 for a package. Mumsnet threads run to hundreds of posts of overwhelmed, sleep-deprived parents. Refusal triggers a 16 to 50 week tribunal wait.
LLM-driven structured document generation against a public statute, public IPSEA template and a well-documented SEND Code of Practice. Solo developer build, Next.js, Anthropic API, Supabase, Stripe.
2026 White Paper consultation closed 18 May, transition continues to 2029/30, appeals at a record 25,000 (up 18% YoY), LA refusal rates rising. Local-authority financial pressure is the tailwind.
Strong four-year window under the current section 36 framework, then a 2029/30 transition to Specialist Provision Packages. Engine pivots, statute references swap, the product itself survives.
Solo, weekends, well under £1,000 to launch. No regulated APIs, no FCA, no GMC, no licensing.
Strongest
Pain
There is no parent in the SEND community who would call the process anything other than gruelling, and the £252 solicitor benchmark is a single drafting letter, not a package.
Watch out
Durability
The 2029/30 transition to Specialist Provision Packages reshapes the assessment, although history says these reforms run late and the transition itself spikes demand for help.
Pain Point
The problem
“How the hell do you get an EHCP? I've read SEND37 twice, I've been to two SENCo meetings, I have a draft letter that's four pages long and I genuinely don't know if it's any good. School won't apply. The LA won't talk to me. My husband has stopped asking how it's going.”
— Mumsnet, AIBU
The pain stacks on four axes that together convert at the £29 to £79 price point.
Asymmetric expertise. The Local Authority has a salaried SEN team and a legal department. The parent has read SEND37 once, half-understood the section 36 threshold, and is being asked to assemble a legally compliant request with no template native to their child's situation. The IPSEA letter is excellent but generic, and 90% of refused parents only learn its true weight at appeal.
Financial. SEN Expert Solicitors charge £252 inc VAT to draft a single needs assessment request letter. SEND-Support packages run £1,000 to £1,500. Independent educational-psychology reports run £600 to £1,500. Many parents go into credit-card debt before tribunal even starts.
Statutory clocks. Once the request is sent, the LA has six weeks to decide whether to assess. Miss a piece of evidence at this stage and the refusal triggers a 16 to 50 week tribunal wait. Get the letter right at this stage and you skip the whole tribunal route, which is 24% of all SEND appeals.
Emotional. Facebook groups and Mumsnet are saturated with "I'm awake at 3am", "I'm going to fail my child" and "I feel like I'm being gaslit by the LA". This is a panic-relief product as much as a legal one.
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