Evaluating the Quality of Education, Health and Care Plans for English Primary School Students with Down Syndrome

The regulation of provisions and supports provided to English children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities are described within the statutory document of the Education Health and Care Plan (EHC plan). Within these plans are outcomes which are what inform the details of the plan, regulate provisions and provide areas of focus for the students learning and development (Department for Education & Department of Health, 2015). These outcomes should be high-quality, participation-focused and in line with SMART criteria descriptions as stated in the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice 2015. High quality outcomes provide students with special educational needs and disabilities the best opportunities to achieve their learning and development aspirations. This thesis aimed to evaluate the quality of outcomes contained within the EHC plans of English primary students with Down syndrome. 17 EHC Plans were included in the quantitative analysis of this non-experimental descriptive research project which provided 226 outcomes to be examined. These plans came from 6 of the 9 regions of England, belonging to 10 boys and 7 girls ranging in age from 5 to 12 years. The outcomes were rated using McWilliam’s Goal Functionality Scale III (2014) with 10% of the outcomes being rated by two independent, trained raters to calculate inter-rater agreement, which was found to be highly reliable (=0.985). Overall, EHC plan outcomes for primary students with Down syndrome were found to be not high-quality, averaging a score of 2.91 out of 7 on the Goal Functionality Scale III (McWilliam, 2014). However, outcome quality varied dramatically across the 7 items of the rating scale, ranging from 0.4% to 96.5% in regards to percentage of outcomes meeting criteria across scale items. Implications drawn from results of this thesis included improving outcome quality through the development of a rating scale created in line with SEND policy and SMART criteria as well as the potential utilization of the ICF in the writing of outcomes. Suggestions were made to research the effectiveness of outcome provision implementation and to improve the training programmes of professionals involved in the outcome writing and intervention process in the future