Councils spend £150m fighting SEND parents in court – despite losing 99% of cases
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/councils-send-cases-parents-schools-5HjdQgw_2/
Posted by StGuthlac2025
Councils spend £150m fighting SEND parents in court – despite losing 99% of cases
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/councils-send-cases-parents-schools-5HjdQgw_2/
Posted by StGuthlac2025
42 Comments
The only reason SEND even still exists is the Government doesn’t count council budget deficits due to it. Otherwise we’d have mass bankruptcies due to how many millions in debt they are.
[see here](https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/central-governments-send-deficits-reform)
“For the past five years, governments have used a ‘statutory override’ to temporarily keep SEND deficits off councils’ books – an accounting manoeuvre that is the only thing preventing almost half of local authorities from declaring effective bankruptcy. The override will expire in March 2028, at which point the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that cumulative deficits will have reached £14bn”
Government need to change legal obligations, such that they actually respect the reality of budgets and resources available. Sorry it will mean prioritisation, but it’s the only way to stop it exploding in cost.
Not surprised they lose so many.
I’ve been fighting our local council for a year because they think my non-verbal, severe global delay son should be in a mainstream classroom when all involved professionals say he shouldn’t be. As part of the fight the council had a special school come out and see him and they’ve said they’d take him. They can’t until council agrees to change their mind though.
It’s absolutely exhausting fighting for help my son clearly needs. He is progressing, but at his own pace and he’s years behind where he should be. Meanwhile the council drags their feet through the tribunal process, after threatening me and the school’s SENCO in mediation didn’t work.
I’m not surprised they’d fight it given the enormous (and massively growing) cost.
You’re looking at tens if not hundreds of thousands per child in a lot of cases.
Maybe investigate why:
>The proportion of children who benefit from this support has doubled in just over a decade.
while they’re at it. We’re having less children, but more are SEND. More recognition would explain some of the increase, but not all.
It’s worth noting what “losing” means from a council point of view. It means the council is not successful on every single single point up for appeal.
A typical outcome of an appeal is the council has to fund some provision but that funding is lower than the amount the parent had asking for. Then there’s also the perverse incentive for councils to drag these things out because as long as the appeal is going on they don’t have to provide the requested funding. The legal costs incurred are often far lower than simply providing the funding.
The problem isn’t the amount of children needing support, or the level of support being given.
The problem is that the entire SEND system has become an industry and is being used to generate high salaries and extreme profits.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds to ferry one child to and from school 5 days a week? When there’s millions of families getting multiple children to multiple schools every day for a minute fraction of that cost? That’s inexcusable profiteering.
£150m on taking cases to tribunal? That money isn’t going to the children or on education, it’s going on the salaries of the people administrating the system. Of course it benefits them to push as many cases as possible into the courts, that’s literally how they get paid.
There are so many potential ways that the system could be made more cost effective without having to neglect disabled children’s needs to achieve it.
No surprise at all. Councils engineered this failure themselves. They treated SEND as an edge case, boxed every child into the same bureaucratic model, then acted shocked when demand exploded. They didn’t plan capacity, didn’t fund provision, didn’t train staff, and didn’t adapt criteria as diagnoses rose. Instead of fixing the system, they burned £150m trying to legally exhaust parents. Losing 99% of cases proves the councils are wrong on the facts, wrong on the law, and fully aware of it. This isn’t incompetence anymore, it’s institutional denial backed by public money. They’re not defending taxpayers; they’re protecting a broken framework that can’t cope with reality.
I a NOT defending the current special educational needs system However, that is a very misleading statistic. All it tells you is that only cases with very strong supporting evidence actually get to to the SEND Tribunal. Many less strong cases don’t get to tribunal because the parents’ legal advisers won’t agree to take a case to Tribunal if it is very likely to lose. Councils may have spent £150 million showing that they are willing to go to court. However, they may have saved 10 times that by deterring less deserving cases and not caving in to threats of court action.
Ignoring the fact that’s misleading since they only get to that stage if its a very good case,that’s a small amount compared to what they would otherwise spend. A child put into a special school could easily cost them an insane amount over a whole childhood with transport costs and school fees.
If there’s even a possibility of a kid being able to attend a normal school, why wouldn’t they heavily push it? A parent is going to prioritise the absolute best for their child but a council is going to say “whats good enough?” because they’d bankrupt themselves otherwise.
Having a child with special educational needs is not a badge of honour. There is no financial benefit to making use of the services the council can provide. If your child was in a class with children who have additional needs, and they’re not getting help, then they will suffer. The help is needed so that all children get a chance to learn together at the same rate.
Councils automatically reject all EHCP applications with the purpose of deterring fraudulent applicants. You have to jump hurdles to get it approved. My son was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD when he turned three. He’s seven now and only got his EHCP approved back in the summer.
I will just say the ugly truth,
Tax only works if it benefits everyone, if a smaller group of people start to benefit and take all the tax and everyone else get less and less people are going to be upset.
Council tax keep increasing for worse service, there is a point where everyone will just say no to these programmes like SEND
Not surprised.
My sister had to fight tooth and nail because the local authority wanted to send my autistic niece to a school that had an ofsted rating of failing, ten miles away from where they lived at the time, instead of another SEND school two miles away that had an outstanding ofsted rating.
My sister fought all the way through arbitration and everything, only for the local authority to drop the case and give in the day before it went to court.
I worked in head office for one one of the larger SEN school providers. They charge councils about £70k a year for providing places and the salaries for yop end are very high. SEN schools should be brought back into government, not greedy private companies.
I am a Parent Governor at our local Primary School and each time the school makes an application for resources to cover SEND pupils it is always rejected at first by the council, who delay at every opportunity until they have to pay.
It does have a negative effect on the teaching of all pupils.
Time to nationalise child and adult social care, and strip the assets from the private leaches who go above and beyond to fuck over local councils and their constituents
This is why I’m against tax increases without fighting the fraud, waste and profiteering inherent in the system.
Some people are making bank. The council paid a private co £100k to paint a Zebra crossing on my road. There is no way it costs that much!
I still do not understand why the parents in most cases cannot take their child to school. Is it because SEN schools are far away? Even so, why does that then become the government’s problem?
> I hate to use the Gen Z term, but I felt gaslit.
Someone should tell her it’s a reference to [a film from the 1940s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)). I dont think she knows what it means though.
Total SEND expenditure nationwide is 2.2 billion. 150 million is absolute peanuts if it delays the costs for a year or two and also discourages people from applying. The point of the court cases is not to get the correct decision but to save the council money because they absolutely cannot afford these mandatory SEND costs.
Lots of people on here would have loved the German T4 programme.
Back in 2018 my son was left without a secondary school because the SEN team consistently screwed up finding him a placement. He was promised a placement two weeks before summer holidays, only for us to receive a phone call three days before schools broke up that they were wrong, and they didn’t have a placement for him. It wasn’t until October that they found him a placement, and only after my wife and I contacted a solicitor to put pressure on the council. The problem is the kids, or us parents, it’s the rampant greed and laziness of those working in the SEN sector. We are going through something similar with our 16 year old who has missed most of the past three years of school due to mental health issues. We have made it abundantly clear that having a school would help their mental health, let alone their right to an education, yet nothing. She’s had at least 10 different case workers in that three year period. It’s a sham.
Yea because from experience they basically do nothing until threatened with legal action they will literally completely abandon a child unpess the parents activly fight and most of the time it ends up in parents basically being forced to use legal action
Just get that money back from Michelle Mone and it’ll be all square
Every part of getting support for my SEND child has been a battle. Luckily we are on the home stretch now having won the battle to get him into a specialist school that fits his needs. My child has v obvious special needs too, non verbal, needs 24/7 care etc. And it was still a fight to get him what he needs. I dread to think what children who dont so obviously present as SEND have to deal with.
It’s hard enough being a parent to a child with special needs as it is, just having to deal with the challenges of daily life, something I didnt fully understand until I became a parent of a SEND child. It’s actually bonkers to have to fight the council on every single piece of getting your child the support they need and should be entitled to.
But if we were some modern artist wanting a £1mil+ in funding for some god awful, eyesore of a “sculpture” that no one wants or needs, they’d be almost giving it away. 🙄
Most councils waste millions each year on legal fees to dodge obligations and cover up failures. Hopefully with the new Hillsborough law they will actually have to publish their legal advice.
My eight-year-old son has been out of school for eight months while we wait for him to be allocated a suitable placement. He is severely autistic with complex additional needs, and the battle to get him the support he deserves feels never-ending. This fight has brought me to my knees at times. It feels as though the authorities do not care about the welfare of the children; instead, they seem focused entirely on how much money they can save.
Are we not allowed to talk about the multi generation cousin marrying elephant in the room?
So many people in this country are employed in the layers of hoop jumping, legislation, and regulation that cutting red tape would be politically impossible just because of the immediate growing in unemployment it would cause.
This is the state for you.
Spends millions on overpriced taxis for SEND students. But also wastes millions more on this.
The waste and fraud within this system is breathtaking.
Time to cut EHCPs and make the criteria harder like Scotland And Wales do
Councils are between a rock and a hard place. More kids are surviving birth with very complex needs and parents want the best education possible for them. The issue in the middle is who and how is the ever increasing educational costs of those children to be funded. Some child placements can be very high cost- and yes there is some profiteering out there- but I don’t think that’s the main issue. The bigger issue is the ever increasing number of complex kids. On the opposite end of the spectrum there is a similar issue- funding of residential and nursing placements for the rapidly expanding volume of older people needing care. If we want the best care for all our children and older people- it has to be paid for- and no one likes Council tax bills to rise or paying more income tax. We just focus on those we feel should get nothing- the “immigrants” and blame them for everything. The stark reality is – providing 8 hours school support on a 1-1 or 2-1 basis ( and then activity centres at night etc) and providing 24/7/365 support for the elderly is expensive. The number of over 80’s in the uk has gone up 23% in the last 10 years and SEND kids has doubled. ( And each parent wants the best, demands the best and goes to Court to ensure they get it) Personally I think it’s older people, not kids who get the worse deal- but try saying that to a parent desperate for respite!
I got asked if I would like my child to be on SEND even though the assessments said she wasn’t. I was told ‘it can help her get her needs met quicker’.
SEND is abused so often that I’m surprised they lose 99% of cases.
Councils should be actually spending a decent amount of money on child phycologists in accessing and supporting these kids. Not only for the benefit of the kids, but also for ensuing that kids who really need help can get it.
The system was designed for when a small minority of students needed SEN care. Now it’s a much higher proportion, the criteria needs to be tightened and schools should assume that most pupils will have some kind of additional needs as part of standard care.
Wow if I was running the council and parents were doing that I’d just shut the lot down because they’re *taking the pi$$*.
It would be a shame but things can’t be allowed to escalate to infinity.
It’s about time everyone stopped behaving like they’re entitled to everything free just because of XXX.
Yes real disablement should be helped but a lot of this is milking the system!
SEND should cover about 5% of school kids, maybe 10% in some areas.
Beyond that, your kid is just normal and normal stuff will deal with their ‘needs’.
Teaching mainstream secondary English back in the day 1990s, 2000s and 2010s that was what my classes looked like, depending on student grouping and so on, such as different groupings for GCSE or year 7. 1 out 30 in a top group (A* to C at GCSE) or 3 out of 30 in an incoming year 7 mixed ability group.
Don’t tell me kids have changed in 10 years!
Just sounds like at one end you’ve got kids in some areas being coached to pass 11+ and other kids being labelled as this and that, for what reason I don’t know, at the other end of things.
I am lefty and not a Daily Mail person but it does strike me this is some kind of out of hand thing.
Kids are kids and come in all different shapes and sizes and parents should support the teachers who are trained to teach their kid. Not get a label for their kid and say ‘My kid has problems’ when 90% of these kids probably don’t and don’t want it.
Can someone offer some context on the data? The LBC report uses ‘goes to tribunal’ which isn’t particularly clear. I work in a different area of litigation and would guess that less than 10% of issued proceedings go to trial. I don’t know the first thing about the SEND tribunal though, so it could well actually mean ‘local authorities lose more than 99% of final hearings’!
Amazing that £150b can be spent on fighting parents for trying to get their children an education they deserve, whilst pretending that VAT on private schools will make all the difference to state schools. What a disgrace.
I’m one of these parents who had to take the council to tribunal.
My son has physical disabilities and absolutely cannot attend a mainstream school. Where we live there was a primary school with a small ‘base’ for 20 children with a specific disability. This is one of my sons disabilities so he was able to attend the school and they tried to accommodate his other disabilities.
Once he reached secondary school age though there was no school in the area for any of the children within that ‘base’. The council made absolutely no provisions for the children once they finish primary school. The only options were not real solutions. Either they attend mainstream school, which are definitely not appropriate for that singular disability let alone my son who has other disabilities. The other option was for these children to travel to a school in another city. If going by car they’d have to leave home at 7am at the latest and wouldn’t get home until after 6pm which is a ridiculously long day for anyone but for someone with a disability it’s even more exhausting. Public transport would make the day even longer and I’d have no time to work because all I’d be doing is commuting all day.
The council decided those were my options. They didn’t care that they had a responsibility towards these children
I remember fighting the council regarding my sibling’s post 16 provision – they would fund taxi transport to college within the county due to lack of public transport, whereas we just wanted a bus pass to cover public transport to the closest (out of county) college. £50 per month vs £50 each way per day, and yet the council did not shift easily to allow the out of county provision!
We probably need more SEN units being built into regular schools, other than for the cases involving really specialized services.
Also, building more housing around SEN schools and giving parents a grace period after which they will have to move. I get that it’s hard, but councils literally can’t afford personalized taxis for years on end.