EHCP Grammar School Admission: What the Law Actually Says

1. Home
2. ›
3. Blog
4. ›
5. EHCP Grammar School Admission

An Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) does not, by itself, guarantee a place at a grammar school. If your local authority names a grammar school in Section I of your child's EHC plan, it cannot lawfully do so — or refuse to do so — simply because your child has or has not sat or passed the school's entrance test; the Children and Families Act 2014 gives it only three narrow grounds for refusing your preferred school (section 39(4)). But once a school is named, its own published admissions arrangements take over, and those arrangements genuinely differ from grammar school to grammar school — some admit EHCP-named children ahead of their oversubscription criteria outright, others still require the child to meet the entrance standard first. This guide sets out both legal layers in plain English, with the actual wording four named grammar schools use in their determined admissions policies, so you know exactly what to check and where to go if a decision does not add up.

What the Law Actually Says: EHCP Naming Rights Under the Children and Families Act 2014

Section 39 of the Children and Families Act 2014 governs how a school gets named in Section I of an EHC plan. When you name a preferred school as part of the consultation process, the local authority must name it in the final plan unless section 39(4) applies. Section 39(4) gives the authority exactly three statutory grounds on which it can refuse:

1. The school is unsuitable for the age, ability, aptitude or special educational needs of the child.
2. Attendance would be incompatible with the provision of efficient education for others.
3. Attendance would be incompatible with the efficient use of resources.

That is the complete list. There is no fourth ground for "the child hasn't taken the entrance test" or "the child hasn't reached the qualifying score." You can read the statute in full at legislation.gov.uk. Case law backs this up: in R v Surrey County Council Education Committee, ex parte P [1997] ELR 516, the courts confirmed a local authority is not required to show a school is the "best" option — only that it can meet the child's special educational needs. And in R v Chair of Governors and Headteacher of A and S School, ex parte T [2000] ELR 274, the courts confirmed the final decision on naming rests with the local authority, not the school itself — a school cannot simply refuse to be named because it objects.

Can a Council Require My Child to Sit or Pass the 11+ Before It Will Name a Grammar School?

No — not as an automatic precondition. This is the specific point IPSEA's guidance on choosing a school or college with an EHC plan addresses: a council weighing up whether to name a grammar school must apply the section 39(4) test above, not a proxy test of "has this child already cleared our admissions hurdle." In practice, this is exactly the question that trips parents up, and it is also the exact question that Special Needs Jungle's published Q&A with IPSEA declines to answer — IPSEA states plainly that the question "would appear to be outside our remit" and redirects the parent to Child Law Advice instead, because grammar school admissions criteria sit partly outside pure SEND law. That gap is real, and it is why the second layer below matters just as much as the statute.

The Second Layer: Why a Grammar School's Own Admissions Arrangements Still Matter

The statutory naming-rights question (above) is only half the picture. Once a school is named, a completely separate legal framework — the School Admissions Code 2021 — governs how that individual school must actually process the admission. Paragraph 1.6 of the Code states plainly: "All children whose Education, Health and Care Plan names the school must be admitted." Paragraph 1.30 goes further for schools that use banding: "Children with Education, Health and Care Plans may be included in banding tests and allocated places in the appropriate bands but, regardless of any banding arrangements, they must be allocated a place if their Education, Health and Care Plan names the school."

Grammar schools sit in an unusual position here. Under section 104 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, existing grammar schools retain the legal right to select "wholly by reference to ability" — the 11+ or equivalent test. The School Admissions Code's general EHCP-override language was not written with selective ability-testing specifically spelled out the way it spells out banding. In practice, this leaves each grammar school's admissions authority (usually the local authority for community/voluntary controlled schools, or the academy trust/governing body for academies and foundation schools) to write its own determined admissions policy addressing exactly how an EHCP interacts with its entrance test — and, as the comparison below shows, they do not all write it the same way.

How Four Named Grammar Schools Actually Treat EHCP-Named Children

These are direct extracts from each school's own published, determined admissions arrangements — not a generic summary. Always check the specific school's current-year policy directly, since admissions authorities re-determine these arrangements annually.

Two of these schools (both administered under the same Kent County Council template) admit an EHCP-named child regardless of test performance, shrinking their intake number to make room. A third (Pate's) admits ahead of the ordinary waiting list, but only once the child has cleared the qualifying standard. A fourth (Heckmondwike) states in terms that the EHCP carries no weight at all until the entrance standard is met. All four policies are lawful on their face — they simply reflect different judgement calls by different admissions authorities about how to reconcile a selective school's right to test by ability with the Code's general EHCP-admission duty. This is the real, verifiable distinction most generic legal guidance skips over.

What Happens If the Grammar School Refuses, or the Council Won't Name It?

If you disagree with the school named in Section I — or a lack of a named school at all — you can appeal to the SEND Tribunal. The deadline is strict: two months from the date of the local authority's decision letter. Miss it and you generally lose the right to appeal that decision. In 2024/25, roughly 25,000 SEND Tribunal appeals were registered across England, the ninth consecutive year of increase and an 18% rise on the year before; about 64% of all appeals concerned the content of the EHC plan (which includes the Section I placement) and a further 24% concerned a refusal to carry out a needs assessment in the first place. Crucially for parents weighing up whether an appeal is worth the stress: local authorities' own reported success rate at contested SEND Tribunal hearings was just 1.1% in the most recent reporting year (2024/25, down from 1.3% in 2023/24) — meaning the overwhelming majority of contested cases that reach a hearing are decided at least partly in the family's favour.

If a school itself refuses to admit your child once it is validly named in Section I, that is a different and more serious problem: under paragraph 1.6 of the School Admissions Code 2021, an admission authority that has been validly named in a finalised EHC plan does not have a lawful basis to simply say no. This is a matter for urgent advice from IPSEA or a SEND solicitor, not something to try to resolve informally with the school office.

EHCPs, SEND and Grammar Schools: The Numbers

Context helps here, because the scale of both systems has grown substantially and neither operates in isolation from the other. There were 163 grammar schools in England as of the most recent House of Commons Library count, educating around 176,000 pupils between them, spread across 37 local authorities (the seven fully or partially selective London boroughs of Barnet, Bexley, Bromley, Enfield, Kingston upon Thames, Redbridge and Sutton, plus around 30 others including Kent, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and Lancashire). On the SEND side, 482,640 pupils in England had an EHC plan in schools in 2025, equal to 5.3% of the school population — up from 4.8% the year before, and more than double the number recorded in 2016. With EHC plan numbers rising this quickly, the interaction between naming rights and selective admissions arrangements is only going to come up more often, not less.

Entrance Test Access Arrangements Are a Different Question

It is worth being precise about what an EHCP does and does not affect on test day itself. Section I naming rights (covered above) are about which school gets named in the plan. A completely separate issue is how the entrance test itself is administered — extra time, rest breaks, a scribe, or other reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010, which most test boards will consider on the basis of evidence including (but not limited to) an EHCP. We cover that mechanic in full, including how to apply and what evidence test boards accept, in our separate guide to 11+ exam access arrangements. Do not assume that arranging extra time for the test is the same process as naming a grammar school in Section I — they are governed by different rules and handled by different people at the school and local authority.

If your child is twice-exceptional — gifted alongside a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia — our dedicated twice-exceptional 11+ preparation guide covers the academic strategy side in detail. For the general mechanics of how grammar school admissions work outside the EHCP question, see our grammar school admissions process guide, and for how qualifying scores are set regionally, our 11+ pass marks by region guide gives useful context for the "Qualifying Standard" language used by schools like Pate's Grammar above.

A Note on Proposed SEND Reform (Not Yet Law, as of August 2026)

Coverage in 2026 has referenced government proposals to reform the SEND system, potentially from 2030, including a suggestion that Individual Support Plans (ISPs) could replace EHC plans for many children in mainstream settings. This is a proposal, not current law. Everything above — the section 39(4) naming rights test, the School Admissions Code paragraph 1.6 duty, and the individual school admissions clauses quoted — reflects the law as it stands today. If and when any reform is actually legislated, the mechanics described in this guide may change, and we will date and flag any update accordingly. Do not make decisions about a live EHC plan or a live grammar school application based on a proposal that has not yet been enacted.

This page is not legal advice. It is a plain-English explainer of the general legal position and published examples current as of August 2026. Every family's EHC plan, and every school's determined admissions arrangements, are different. For advice on your specific case, contact IPSEA or a solicitor specialising in SEND law.

Frequently Asked Questions