EHCP Cease to Maintain Appeal: What to Do When the LA Wants to End Your Child's Plan

A letter arrives from the local authority saying they intend to cease to maintain your child's EHCP. The reasons sound plausible — "needs are now being met," "sufficient progress has been made," "an EHCP is no longer necessary." For many parents, this feels like the ground disappearing beneath them.

Before accepting this decision, understand the law. The circumstances in which a local authority can legally cease an EHCP are narrow and precisely defined. If they do not fit your child's situation, the decision is unlawful and can be overturned on appeal.

When Can a Local Authority Legally Cease an EHCP?

Section 45 of the Children and Families Act 2014 sets out the two circumstances in which an LA may cease to maintain an EHCP:

1. The LA is no longer responsible for the child or young person. This happens when the young person moves out of the local authority's area, takes up paid employment (which ends the LA's education duty), or is detained in custody for a period exceeding 12 months. If none of these apply to your child, this ground does not exist.

2. The LA determines the EHCP is no longer necessary. This is the ground most often cited — but the threshold for making this determination lawfully is high. The LA must be satisfied that the young person no longer requires the special educational provision specified in the plan. This is not the same as the child making progress or coping in the current setting. It means the underlying needs no longer require statutory provision to be met.

An LA that uses an Annual Review to signal it wants to reduce costs, or that relies on school reports of "good progress" without independent assessment, may well be making an unlawful cease to maintain decision.

The Annual Review as the Trigger

Cease to maintain decisions almost always follow an Annual Review. The school submits a review report suggesting the EHCP is no longer needed; the LA uses this as the basis for a formal notice.

The key question to ask at any Annual Review where cessation is being discussed: what has actually changed? Progress within a specialist placement with the support the EHCP funds is not evidence that the support is no longer needed. It is evidence that the support is working. These are opposite conclusions.

If the Annual Review report is based largely on teacher observations rather than current, independently commissioned specialist assessments, challenge the evidential basis of any cease to maintain proposal before the LA issues a formal decision.

What Happens When You Receive a Formal Notice

The LA must send you a formal notice of its intention to cease to maintain the plan. This triggers a statutory right of appeal to the SEND Tribunal. You have two months from the date of the LA's decision letter (or one month from the date of a mediation certificate, whichever is later) to register your appeal.

Before appealing, you must contact a Mediation Information and Advice Service (MIAS) to discuss mediation. You will receive a mediation certificate whether or not you choose to proceed with mediation. That certificate is required to register the appeal.

Your Most Important Right: The Stay of the Plan

Section 45(4) of the Children and Families Act 2014 contains a protection that many families do not know about: once you register an appeal against a cease to maintain decision, the LA is legally barred from ceasing to maintain the plan — and from ceasing to fund the provision — until the Tribunal appeal is completely resolved.

This means that from the moment your appeal is registered, the status quo is preserved. The school placement must continue. The provision must continue. The LA cannot simply wind down funding while the appeal is pending.

Register the appeal promptly. Do not wait to see if the LA changes its mind through mediation unless you are confident that mediation will produce a binding written agreement to withdraw the cessation notice. If mediation fails, you need time to build your Tribunal case — and the clock runs from the LA's decision letter, not from when mediation concludes.

Building Your Case at Tribunal

To win a cease to maintain appeal, you need to demonstrate that your child still has special educational needs that require provision to be made via an EHCP. The standard is the same as the original threshold: does the child have needs that "may be necessary" to address through an EHCP?

Get current independent assessments. If the last Educational Psychology report is more than a year old, commission an updated one. Current specialist assessments showing ongoing need are the most powerful evidence you can present. A report that says "significant progress has been made but X, Y, and Z needs remain and require specialist support" directly addresses the LA's argument.

Obtain written evidence from professionals involved in the child's daily support. The SENCO, class teacher, therapists — anyone who can provide contemporaneous evidence of what support is currently in place and what would happen if it were withdrawn. Ask them specifically: "If the EHCP provision ceased today, what impact would that have on [child's name]?"

Document the specific provision currently funded and what it achieves. Attendance records, progress reports, incident logs. The argument is often that the child is doing well because of the EHCP provision, and that removing it would lead to rapid deterioration.

Address the LA's evidence directly. Obtain a copy of the Annual Review report and challenge any assessments or statements that are inaccurate, out of date, or based on observation rather than specialist assessment.

What the Tribunal Considers

The Tribunal will look at the evidence as it stands at the date of the hearing, not as it stood when the LA made its decision. New evidence commissioned after the LA's notice is entirely permissible.

The Tribunal panel will ask: does this child currently have special educational needs? If yes, can those needs be met adequately through the school's ordinary SEN support, or do they require the more intensive statutory provision only an EHCP can secure? The burden is on the LA to justify cessation — it is not on you to prove the EHCP should continue from scratch.

Post-16 and Post-18: Special Considerations

For young people approaching or past 16, LAs sometimes attempt cease to maintain decisions on the basis that the young person is "no longer in education." The law is clear: an EHCP can and should continue up to age 25 provided the young person remains in education or training, and provided they still require the provision. A young person in further education who still has the underlying needs the EHCP was designed to address cannot lawfully have their plan ceased simply because they have crossed an age threshold.

If the LA's stated reason for cessation is that the young person is "transitioning" or "moving into adult services," challenge this explicitly. Adult social care eligibility is a separate assessment process. The EHCP cannot be ceased simply because adult services are being considered.

Getting Support

The England SEND Tribunal Playbook covers cease to maintain appeals in detail — including how to analyse the LA's evidence, structure your working document for Tribunal, and brief an independent EP on what the appeal requires them to address. If the LA wants to end your child's plan, the Tribunal process exists specifically to challenge that decision with independent evidence.

In the 2023/24 academic year, families won the overwhelming majority of decided Tribunal cases. The local authority success rate at hearing is around 1%. That asymmetry exists because the law is designed to protect children with genuine ongoing needs — and cease to maintain decisions that do not meet the legal threshold are routinely overturned.

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