One record for the whole team around the child
Coordinated care costs less than crisis care. Children with autism and complex needs are supported by their school, the local authority, community paediatrics, CAMHS, therapists and their family, who rarely share a record. When warning signs don’t reach the people who can act on them, care escalates to A&E and, for some children, to a hospital admission far from home. FPK-X gives the whole team one record.
This page is for integrated care boards, local authority SEND and children’s services teams, Designated Clinical and Medical Officers, community paediatrics, children and young people’s mental health services, and keyworking services. Figures are for England unless stated; see Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
By the numbers
- 718,838EHC plans in England in January 2026, for children and young people aged 0–25 (DfE, 2026)
- 46.1%of new EHC plans in 2025 were issued within the 20-week legal limit (DfE, 2026)
- 1 in 3pupils with an EHC plan have autism as their primary need (33.5%) (DfE, 2026)
- 294,792people with an open referral for suspected autism in June 2026; 86.8% had waited at least 13 weeks (NHS England, 2026)
Published figures, not FPK data. The autism referral figure covers all ages and excludes community paediatric assessments, so it undercounts children. In August 2026, 215 people under 18 with a learning disability or autism were in hospital in England (NHS England, 2026).
A shared duty, without a shared record
Local authorities and their partner commissioning bodies must make joint commissioning arrangements for the education, health and care provision of children and young people with SEND (Children and Families Act 2014, s26). The SEND Code of Practice asks for a Designated Medical or Clinical Officer to support that work (DfE & DHSC, 2015), and NICE recommends that every child or young person diagnosed with autism has a case manager or keyworker to coordinate their care (NICE, 2013).
Each of those people still works from a different record. FPK-X gives the school, the family, therapists and health professionals one timeline, with role-based access the family controls.
What a crisis costs
| Event | Average cost |
|---|---|
| Emergency care attendance (Unit Costs of Health and Social Care, 2025) | £280 |
| Non-elective inpatient stay, short stay (2025) | £824 |
| Non-elective inpatient stay, long stay (2025) | £5,395 |
National averages from the 2024/25 National Cost Collection, across all ages; no published figure is specific to children. Your own costs will differ.
Evidence on coordination
UK outcome evidence is still limited. An evaluation of NHS England’s keyworking programme for children and young people with a learning disability or autism, across 15 early-adopter sites, reported that risk de-escalated in the first six months of keyworker support, but it did not measure admissions or A&E use (Arden & GEM, 2024).
Internationally, a randomised trial of high-risk children with chronic illness found that comprehensive coordinated care in an enhanced medical home cut, per 100 child-years (Mosquera et al., 2014):
- −52%emergency department visits (90 vs 190)
- −49%hospitalisations (69 vs 131)
- −55%children with a serious illness (10 vs 22)
- −42%cost of care per child-year (cost ratio 0.58)
A US trial at one site with 201 children; the authors call for larger studies. It tested a clinical medical home, not FPK-X.
What FPK-X does today, and what it does not yet do
The status column says what our evidence shows today. Where something is not yet built, we say so.
- Shown in use with a real team
- Partly shown some of it in use
- To build not yet present
| Need | What our evidence shows | Status |
|---|---|---|
| One record across school, home and therapy | 12 people in 7 roles from school and therapy, plus the family, in one record with role-based access | Shown |
| A longitudinal view for a keyworker | A timeline across every provider, with an automatically built year-in-review | Shown |
| Duplicate or missing provision made visible | One de-duplicated timeline shows where provider notes and official service records disagree | Shown |
| Early warning signs | Incident reports capture triggers, what helped and follow-up; A&E and admission tracking is not built yet | Partly shown |
| Evidence for EHC needs assessments and annual reviews | School, home and therapy observations gathered in one place, with a year-in-review report; no EHC needs assessment workflow yet | Partly shown |
| Working with existing records | Imports existing documents and spreadsheets and de-duplicates them; no integration with NHS or local authority systems yet | Partly shown |
| Language access | Multi-language support is on the roadmap | To build |
| Results in a UK setting | Our first measured results come from a school team in the United States; we have not yet measured a UK service | To build |
“Shown” refers to one school team’s use of FPK-X in the 2025–26 school year. See what we’ve measured so far for that result and its limits, and the sample reports the team received.
A proposed pilot
We would like to test this with an integrated care board, a local authority or a keyworking service, and measure it properly:
- Agree a cohort of children with complex needs and their families’ consent.
- Connect the family, the school (SENCO, teachers and teaching assistants) and the health professionals involved in FPK-X.
- Measure the time spent gathering advice and evidence for EHC needs assessments and annual reviews.
- Track A&E attendances and admissions for the cohort against an agreed comparison.
- Ask families how often they have to repeat the same information to different services.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
Scotland
Additional support for learning, with Co-ordinated Support Plans for children who need them, alongside NHS boards.
Wales
Additional learning needs under the ALN Act 2018, with Individual Development Plans, alongside local health boards.
Northern Ireland
Statements of special educational needs, with a new SEN framework being introduced, alongside health and social care trusts.
The same shared record supports each nation’s plan. A pilot uses the plans, roles and measures of your own system.
Talk to us about a health or SEND pilot
Tell us about your service and the children you have in mind. Please don’t include a child’s name or health details in a first message.
Register your interestReferences
- Arden & GEM Commissioning Support Unit (2024). Evaluating the impact of the keyworking programme for children and young people with a learning disability and/or autism. ardengemcsu.nhs.uk
- Children and Families Act 2014, section 26. legislation.gov.uk
- Department for Education & Department of Health and Social Care (2015). Special educational needs and disability code of practice: 0 to 25 years. gov.uk
- Department for Education (2026, 25 June). Education, health and care plans: Reporting year 2026. explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk
- Department for Education (2026, 11 June). Special educational needs in England: Academic year 2025/26. explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk
- Mosquera, R. A., Avritscher, E. B., Samuels, C. L., et al. (2014). Effect of an enhanced medical home on serious illness and cost of care among high-risk children with chronic illness: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 312(24), 2640–2648. doi:10.1001/jama.2014.16419
- NHS England (2026, 13 August). Autism statistics, July 2025 to June 2026. digital.nhs.uk
- NHS England (2026, 17 September). Learning disability services statistics: AT August 2026, MHSDS July 2026. digital.nhs.uk
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2013, updated 2021). Autism spectrum disorder in under 19s: support and management (CG170). nice.org.uk
- Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent (2026). Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2025 (Table 6.1.1, from the 2024/25 National Cost Collection). kar.kent.ac.uk
For the research on documentation burden and structured data in schools, see the research behind FPK.