Yesterday, England’s HM Courts and Tribunals Service issued their annual set of statistics about the activities of the Special Educational Needs and Disability First-Tier Tribunal (SENDIST).
SENDIST is a legal tribunal where families can appeal against a specified range of local authority decisions that affect their children or young people. These decisions revolve around the Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) process. EHCPs, for the uninitiated, are statutory plans that are supposed to underpin support for many children and young people with SEND. SENDIST also hears appeals about particular types of disability discrimination.
The figures released yesterday cover the 2023-24 academic year. The numbers are at the national level: they aren’t broken down for each local authority. If you want to get at the SENDIST data directly, you can find it here.
If you want a quick, visual, summary of the headline numbers, check the infographics at the bottom of this article. But, if you want to dive deeper, and find out what it all means, keep reading!
The SENDIST 2024 statistics—not pleasant reading for anyone
The number of SENDIST appeals and hearings has been increasing steadily for years. This year, numbers have gone through the roof.
Families registered 21,106 appeals with the SEND First Tier Tribunal in the 2023-24 academic year – 54.53% up on the previous year. That’s the largest number of appeals ever recorded in a single year, and the largest increase in any year. It’s more than six times the number of annual appeals registered when the last SEND reforms were introduced in 2014.
In 2023-24, roughly one in ten of these appeals was registered as an ‘extended appeal,’ where SENDIST can make non-binding recommendations about health and social care, as well as its standard binding orders regarding education.
SENDIST saw 16,726 appeals through to completion in 2032-24. That’s 40% up on last year: the largest total ever, the fastest growth rate ever, and a number that’s 3.5 times larger than 2014-15, when the SEND reforms were introduced.
Two-thirds of these 16,726 appeals went all the way to a formal Tribunal hearing, without being settled beforehand. The number of SENDIST appeals decided this way is now 14 times larger than it was when the SEND reforms began in 2014.
Most families who appeal to SENDIST are already in the EHCP system. As has been the case for a while now, the most common types of appeal are disputes about the contents of a plan (62%), rather than the process of getting a needs assessment or securing a plan (35%).
Some of this growth reflects the overall rise in EHCP numbers—but not much of it. The number of children and young people with statutory SEN plans has more than doubled in a decade – but the number of SENDIST appeals has grown sixfold over the same timeframe.
What do appeal outcomes look like, and how much does this cost the public purse?
In 2023-24, SENDIST panels upheld the local authority’s original decision in just 150 of the 11,157 appeals that went to a full hearing. That’s an LA success rate of 1.3% – the lowest on record.
That doesn’t mean that every single aspect of 99% of appeals went families’ way – but our previous Freedom of Information requests on the subject tell us that it’s very close to that.
The cost to the public purse of defending the indefensible? Over £165 million in the last academic year alone, and more than £600 million over the last decade
- We estimate that in aggregate, LAs allocated £153 million of resources to Tribunal appeal defence in 2032-24.
- Department for Education payments data shows that the Department paid HM Courts & Tribunals Service £13.5 million in the 2023-24 academic year to help keep SENDIST going. £152.8m + £13.5m + unknown extra cost to HMCTS = Over £165m
- Since the SEND reforms were implemented in September 2014, we estimate LAs have consumed over half a billion pounds (£580 million) of resource defending SENDIST tribunals, scoring an average 4% success rate at hearings over that period.
- The additional wider costs to the public purse (mostly the costs to the Ministry of Justice of running the appeals) probably run into the tens of millions of pounds per year, according to academic research.
- The financial and human cost to children and young people with SEND and their families is incalculable. But it’s absolutely real, almost entirely avoidable, and utterly indefensible.
Grim numbers, but it’s worse for families
These are grim figures, and it’s important to put them in the right context. So it’s worth remembering the following three things:
First up: Parent carers do not ‘win’ Tribunal appeals. Ever. And though local authorities do not prevail, they don’t really ‘lose’ them either.
If a SENDIST appeal is allowed, and if goes the families’ way, what they’ve ‘won’ is the same right to an appropriate education that millions of families of children without SEND take for granted—just with extra delay, cost and pain.
For financially hard-pressed local authorities, even if their original decision gets overturned at SENDIST, then the lengthy appeal process means that expenditure has been deferred, and that potential appellants are deterred. That’s why so many LAs are willing to prolong and defend the indefensible in this setting.
Secondly: there is certainly inequity in the appeals process, but it’s not what you think.
As a family, you need resources to mount a SENDIST appeal. Time most of all, but also capacity, a lot of mental resilience, sometimes money, sometimes reasonable adjustments. Families who already have those things are better placed to mount a SENDIST appeal than those who don’t. But according to judges, most families do not have legal representation.
It’s frustrating to see commentators express head-tilting concern about inequity of opportunity between families, while ignoring the resource inequity between the appellant and the respondent.
Families appealing at SENDIST, almost always legally inexperienced, are putting themselves up against a public body with vastly greater resources, superior knowledge of the SEND system, and long familiarity with the Tribunal process and procedure. Put bluntly, talk to families who appeal to SENDIST, and you’ll find people who have drained their life savings, pawned their engagement rings, left employment, or even deferred chemotherapy simply to sustain their appeal. The same isn’t the case on the respondent side.
Some families find themselves turning to advocacy support that isn’t always top-quality. If you need help finding and choosing support, I’d strongly recommend reading this guide, co-produced by parents, SEND specialists, and legal professionals earlier this year. We also have our own article as a taster.
So when you hear people complain about inequity in the SENDIST process, ask them two things:
- Who should be changing their behaviour to reduce that inequity, without compromising outcomes for the child or their rights? Is it families, or is it the public sector?
- And who is currently doing most to reduce that inequity at ground level? Is it families, or is it the public sector?
And finally: the Tribunal’s rulings and outcomes have nothing to do with parental feelings, and very little to do with parental preference.
SENDIST isn’t a divorce counsellor; it steps into the shoes of the local authority, looks at the decisions that the LA made, and amends those decisions if law and evidence show that they were faulty. There aren’t many places where the quality of official SEND decision-making is laid bare. SENDIST is one of those places. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman is another.
SENDIST data shines a clear light on the quality of official SEND decision-making at the operational level—where it affects individuals. And as the figures above demonstrate, that decision-making is predominantly awful. It’s worse than any other English first-tier tribunal domain where public sector decisions are examined.
And it’s not just predominantly awful—it’s consistently awful over time. The same outcomes happen month after month, year after year, decade after decade, with no real professional consequences for the decision-makers, and no indication whatsoever that they learn anything from the experience.
Appeal rates are not the whole story
Central government likes to say that the vast majority of LA decisions aren’t contested. It points to an official appeal rate statistic that shows that only 2.5% of LA decisions are appealed to SENDIST. The problem with that figure is it assumes a fantasy world where the SEND system works. And as we all know, it doesn’t.
This appeal rate stat is calculated by theoretical opportunities to appeal. Most of these opportunities just don’t exist in reality. Roughly 80% of them are for decisions that LAs make at EHCP annual reviews, a process that has largely broken down.
Narrow things down by specific types of SENDIST appeal where it’s possible to measure more accurately, and the appeal rate jumps up sharply:
- For appeals against a local authority refusing to conduct an EHC needs assessment, the appeal rate is around 15%
- For appeals against LAs refusing to issue an EHCP after an assessment, the appeal rate is around 25%—one in four—and climbing fast.
By way of comparison…
One in four. Let’s imagine a different scenario. The Department for Education and its agencies employ over 13,000 people. The DfE is put through only a handful of employment tribunals each year. But let’s imagine the DfE conducts itself like local authority SEND services do. Let’s imagine one in four of the DfE’s 13,000 employees takes the Department to an employment tribunal each year, every year.
Let’s imagine that the Department’s conduct was found faulty in 99% of appeals taken to court – each year, every year, and for the same reasons each year, avoidably harming the lives of thousands of people. In this imaginary world, people would assume—rightly—that the Department was rotten to the core: morally spavined, incapable of improvement, astonishingly, arrogantly, and unjustifiably wasteful of human capital and public resources.
But we don’t live in an imaginary world. This is SEND. This is how things work, right here, right now.
And things are not looking up. The very people who are making indefensible SEND decisions—each year, every year, for the same reasons each year—are now advising central government that it’s the Tribunal itself that’s the problem. Not them.
And, shockingly, central government is listening.
Will upcoming reform cripple SENDIST?
The new government has indicated it’s planning deep and lengthy reform of the SEND system. In response, local authorities are pushing hard—very, very hard—to clip SENDIST’s judicial freedom.
The reasoning behind local government’s proposals isn’t sophisticated. It’s basically the same reasoning as you get from a deadbeat dad in a urine-and-Special Brew-stained Batman costume, yelling that the courts have ruined his life and turned the weans against him.
But the SEND funding crisis makes this political, and people with influence and power are taking their proposals seriously.
Local government’s main proposals can be found in evidence that the Local Government Association (LGA) submitted to the Public Accounts Committee recently, as one of several recommended reforms to the SEND system:
“In order for the system to be equitable and sustainable, the state must be clear on where the limits of individual choice and entitlement lie. A reformed SEND statutory framework should include new, independent, non-judicial mechanisms for dealing with disagreements about decision-making (where we see a role for an ombudsman) and about access to specific provision (where we envisage a role for the National Institute [of Inclusive Education], as opposed to the Tribunal).”
LGA
This so-called “National Institute of Inclusive Education” doesn’t exist—yet—it’s a clearing house that local government and its flying monkeys are proposing for setting national SEND standards and lightly regulating the system. This particular proposal cannot happen without changes to the law: it’s not imminent, and central government would have to agree to it and make it happen.
Local Government wants to decimate your disabled child’s rights
In the interim, the LGA has recommended one way of dealing with the backlog at SENDIST—scrapping an entire class of appeal, to stop families contesting council refusals to conduct an EHC needs assessment. If agreed, it would effectively choke off the future appeal rights of many children who need an EHCP but don’t yet have one. That’s because you’d only be able to appeal about the contents of an EHCP that the LA deemed your child worthy of. Again, this can’t happen without a change to the law.
In the short-term, one LA – Norfolk County Council, a council working under a Safety Valve SEND financial agreement, has made a pitch to the Department for Education. It wants the DfE to force SENDIST to “take account” of the LA’s financial position when making appeal decisions against SENDIST rulings. We don’t know how the DfE responded to this pitch, but (again) it would require a change to the law.
Local government’s message is simple: SENDIST is biased toward families, it doesn’t take financial reality into account, and it needs to be cut out of the SEND system. This is also bollocks.
No, SENDIST is not biased towards families. Yes, their decisions do take the efficient use of resources into account. To hammer this home, local authorities’ dismal outcomes at SENDIST are mirrored almost exactly in a completely different domain, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, where 92% of complaints about LA SEND administration are upheld.
LA SEND decision-making incompetence laid bare
There is no Venn diagram here; SENDIST and LGSCO operate as two separate circles of scrutiny. The LGSCO went to the High Court to make absolutely sure that’s the case. SENDIST and LGSCO employ different people. They handle different types of SEND casework. There is no cross-over at all. The common denominator here is local authority incompetence and maladministration, and local authority leaders’ near-total disinterest in learning any lessons from the external scrutiny they receive.
It’s a vital thing to remember for those reforming the SEND system. The quality of strategic and operational local authority decision-making is the main reason why every gleaming white SEND policy lever works like a marzipan dildo when it gets pulled.
You can try nudging and incentivising impotent SEND stakeholders until the heat death of the universe. But if you change the system without changing the powerful people who make those decisions, the results are predictable. And our kids are the ones who bear the cost of that.
Here comes the infographic
Download the infographics in a PDF:
These graphics are offered free for non-commercial download and sharing only.
Also read:
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals
- When things go right: Shining a light on SEND Practitioners making a positive impact [Giveaway!]
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children
- Have your say on the future of transport for disabled children and young people
- Unison voices major concerns over SEND reform health plans for sick and disabled children out of school in the EOTAS consultation
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support
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Matt specialises in SEND stats, data analysis, and in-depth investigations of policies. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, and his articles for SNJ on SEND funding, local government policy, and the SENDIST Tribunal have been quoted in Select Committee inquiry reports and national media.
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support - August 19, 2026
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters - July 22, 2026
- EHCPs 2026: A relentless rise, but who’s surprised? Plus SNJ’s annual LA Hall of Shame - June 27, 2026
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