Lesson 2.3
What your child is entitled to
Information, not legal advice. Applies in England. Reviewed June 2026.
Your child’s EHC plan has many sections, but one of them holds the actual help: Section F. This is the special educational provision. It is the list of exactly what your child will receive, who will deliver it, how often, and for how long. When people talk about what a child is “entitled to”, this is where that entitlement lives.
Section F matters more than any other part of the plan, because it is the part the Local Authority has an absolute legal duty to put in place.
Here is the catch. That duty is to secure what is “specified”. So the strength of the duty depends entirely on how clearly the provision is written. A duty to deliver something vague is, in practice, a duty to deliver almost nothing. That is why two words protect your child more than any others: specified and quantified.
Specified means the plan names the actual support. Not “support with literacy”, but “one to one teaching from a qualified specialist teacher, using a named programme”.
Quantified means the plan puts numbers on it: how many hours, how many sessions, how often, for how long, and delivered by whom.
So instead of “access to speech and language therapy”, a strong plan says something like “speech and language therapy delivered directly by a therapist for a set number of sessions each term, plus time to train the staff working with the child”. Now everyone knows what should happen, and everyone can tell whether it happened.
This is your leverage. Vague wording like “access to”, “opportunities for”, “regular” or “as appropriate” sounds reassuring but cannot be enforced, because nobody can prove whether it was delivered. Specific, quantified wording can. The moment it is not delivered, you can point to the exact line and say: this was promised, this has not happened.
This is information and preparation help, not legal advice, and it covers England only. The law differs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Before you send your wording, run it past IPSEA or your local SENDIASS so it is as strong as it can be.