The single most useful thing you can do with the free SEND Parents Help assistant is hand it one of your own documents. Ask it a general question and you get a general answer. Upload your child’s draft Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), your half-finished Disability Living Allowance (DLA) form or a letter from the local authority, and the answer is suddenly about your child, in your words, on your timeline.
This is the third guide in our Getting Started with AI series. If chatbots are new to you, start with a beginner’s guide to AI, and if you have not signed up yet, create a free ChatGPT account first. This post assumes you have an account and are ready to put a document in front of the assistant.
What can I upload?
Almost anything that lands on your doormat or in your inbox. The documents parents share most often are:
- A draft or final EHCP, for a section-by-section read
- A DLA form, to sanity-check your descriptors before you post it
- A letter from the local authority you need help making sense of
- A school report or SEN Support plan
- A professional report, such as an educational psychologist or speech and language report, to help build your case
The assistant reads common file types: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text, images and spreadsheets. If your document is a printed letter or a paper form, you do not need a scanner. Take a clear photo with your phone in good light, with the whole page in the frame, and upload the picture. The assistant can read text straight out of an image.
A word on privacy before you start
This matters, so we will be plain about it. SEND Parents Help is an independent guide. We never receive, see or store your files. When you upload a document, it goes directly to ChatGPT, which is run by OpenAI, under their privacy terms, not ours.
For most letters and forms that is a sensible trade for the help you get back. But your child’s paperwork is sensitive, so a couple of small habits are worth building. Where a document is full of identifying detail, swap your child’s full name for their initials before you upload, and trim out anything you do not need the assistant to see, such as your address or reference numbers.
If you would rather keep a particular document off a third-party service altogether, use our Doc Tools page. It pulls the text out of a PDF or photo entirely inside your own browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere, and you can then paste just the relevant lines into ChatGPT. It is a good habit for the most sensitive papers.
How to upload on a computer
The steps are the same whether you are checking an EHCP or a benefit form.
1. Open a chat with the assistant. Open the SEND Parents Help assistant inside ChatGPT. If you are not signed in, sign in first.
2. Find the plus button. At the bottom of the screen there is a message box. On the left of it sits a small + (plus) button. Click it and you will see options to upload from your computer or to connect cloud storage such as Google Drive or OneDrive.
3. Choose your file. Pick the document. Its name appears in the message box, which tells you it is attached and ready to send.
4. Say what you need. Type a short message explaining what you want, then press Enter. The clearer you are, the better the reply.
That last step is where most of the value lives, so it is worth slowing down on.
How do I get a better answer?
The assistant gives a sharper reply when you give it context. Tell it your child’s age, their main difficulties, and the one thing you want it to focus on. Compare these two messages:
- “Check this EHCP.”
- “My child is 8 and has autism. Can you check whether Section F has enough detail, and flag anything written too vaguely to be enforceable?”
The second gets you a list you can act on. There is no wrong way to ask, and you can always send a follow-up. If the first answer is too broad, just reply with “focus on the speech and language provision” or “now check the DLA descriptors for the care component.”
For specific jobs, we have walkthroughs that pair with this one: how to check a draft EHCP with AI, how to understand SEND letters and reports with AI, and how to use AI to fill in a DLA form.
How to upload on your phone
If you mostly use your phone, this is just as easy. In the ChatGPT app, tap the + (plus) button next to the message box, then either choose a file from your phone’s storage or take a photo of a paper document there and then. If you use ChatGPT in your phone’s web browser instead, you will see the same + button in the same place.
Taking a photo on the spot is often the quickest route for a letter that has just arrived. Lay it flat, get good light, fill the frame, and upload.
What happens next
The assistant reads the document and replies in plain language. It might give you a section-by-section summary, flag wording too vague to hold up, point out a need with no matching support, or tell you which DLA descriptor your notes seem to fit. None of this replaces formal advice, but it gives you a calm starting point and the words to ask better questions, whether that is to the school, the local authority or an adviser.
You can keep going in the same chat. Upload another page, ask a follow-up, or paste in a reply you have drafted and ask the assistant to check it. The document is the start of the conversation, not the end of it.