Help Measure what Matters challenge the practices that leave children without education… and families fighting the same battles, again and again.
A child’s education should never depend on whether a council has completed its internal paperwork.
Yet evidence we have gathered suggests that internal approvals, commissioning arrangements, and administrative processes are determining when—and sometimes whether—children receive the education and support the law says they are entitled to.
At Measure What Matters, we believe the problem goes far deeper than individual delay or poor administration.
The evidence presented to us raises a serious question: Are LAs now operating internal policies and working practices that are incompatible with their legal duties to children?
A devastating impact on families
The impact can be devastating. Children are losing days, weeks and months of education. Trusted support is being withdrawn, and learning opportunities are lost that cannot be recovered.
It means parents are spending precious time they should have with their children, or losing working hours, frustratedly seeking answers from public officials over missing legally required support. Many parents are forced to give up work altogether, leading to financial pressure. Entire family units can collapse under the pressure this creates.
Measure What Matters is aiming to launch a legal challenge to answer a single, vital question: When the law says a council must secure a child’s educational provision, can it allow its own internal processes to determine whether and when that provision is actually delivered?
The problem we’re pursuing
Over the years, increasing numbers of complaints, Ombudsman findings, political pressure, media investigations, and individual legal action have exposed unprecedented levels of serious failures and secured vital help.
Yet resolving one child’s case often has no wider impact on the practices behind it, meaning it continues to happen to other families. One successful case means one child’s provision is–often temporarily–restored. Another family starts their own fight for the same reasons, while those without the resources, capacity, or strength to keep challenging continue to be denied their rights.
SEND families have long waited for an opportunity to bring their evidence together and start to challenge the very practices that keep forcing them back into battle. This campaign aims to make that possible.
We have gathered detailed evidence from hundreds of cases like these, which our legal team is now to establish if these policies and practices are compatible with the law. If the grounds are established, we will pursue a systemic challenge through judicial review.
The aim is simple: lasting systemic change that reaches well beyond the families who bring the case.
Our legal team—and how you can help
Measure What Matters has now instructed Irwin Mitchell, with its substantial experience in public law, education and disability rights. Irwin Mitchell are instructing a counsel team led by Steve Broach KC, a nationally recognised public-law barrister with great expertise in SEND and the rights of disabled children and young people.
We have already assembled detailed documentary evidence and accounts from affected families and providers.
We now need to raise approximately £7,500 to fund the next two stages:
- Stage 1– Specialist legal investigation, confirmation of suitable lead claimants and;
- Stage 2– Preparation to move swiftly towards a formal pre-action challenge.
Our legal team have undertaken to complete this vital work at substantially reduced rates, allowing a relatively modest fund to support an investigation with potentially far-reaching significance. These first stages will rigorously test the case and determine whether there are grounds on which it can proceed.
Please donate what you can and, even if you cannot donate, sharing this campaign is really helpful. Together, you now have an opportunity to challenge the system that keeps leaving families to fight alone.
This legal challenge starts in Surrey. Here’s why
For children who cannot access suitable education in school, council-arranged provision can be their entire education. This includes children receiving Alternative Provision and those with Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS) arrangements. Others rely on independently commissioned teaching or therapies alongside their school placement to ensure they can attend at all.
These arrangements often depend on support from highly specialist providers and relationships built over months, sometimes years.
However, for many families this process is far from straightforward. They often face long periods where the education their child is entitled to is not delivered by the local authority responsible for arranging it.
Families across England will recognise these failures.
Among the six largest county councils, a search of recently published Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) decisions returned 107 serious upheld complaints about Alternative Provision.
Of those, one LA alone, Surrey County Council, accounted for 44- more than twice the number in any other council in the comparator group.
In July 2026, providers approached us after being told by Surrey County Council not to continue educational and therapeutic provision beyond approved end dates, even while continuation decisions remained outstanding. Multiple families soon confirmed their children’s educational provision had not been secured for the autumn term, with just days to go before the summer break.
Having assessed the situation, we issued formal briefings and warnings. MPs and councillors intervened. The media reported the issue as the start of the new term approached. We escalated the issue directly to the Secretary of State for Education. Yet still, many families began the autumn term without confirmed or complete provision.
Those experiences now sit alongside a substantial body of wider documentary evidence: council instructions, published audit findings and accounts from families and providers. Together, they provide a basis for investigating the connection between council processes and repeated, prolonged failures to deliver children’s provision. The paperwork may call it “awaiting approval” but for a child, it may mean no teaching, no therapy, and the loss of trusted relationships painstakingly built to make learning possible.
This matters for families across the country
We start in Surrey because we now have the evidence to build the proposed case. However, the potential for meaningful change reaches right across England.
A successful challenge could require changes to the practices that repeatedly leave children without provision and establish legal principles with significance across England- giving families a stronger basis to hold councils to their duties, without having to fight the same battles child by child, term by term, year by year.
We do not assume that every local authority in England operates the same processes. But the principle is the same in education authorities across the country. Public authorities have discretion over how they organise their services but they cannot ‘organise’ away the law.
You do not need to live in Surrey, or have a child with special educational needs, to care whether public bodies honour their duties to children. This case matters to everyone who believes accountability should protect those least able to demand it.
A note about the SEND proposals and local government changes
Despite the Govenment’s SEND reform proposals, the current law is still in force. Even if new legislation goes ahead, nothing will change legally for several years. Every year is vital for children’s support. Even so, parents are reporting instances of councils are acting as though their duties have changed. If you notice this, please let us know.
Our first case concerns Surrey, which will soon be broken up into East and West Surrey. However, our cases follow the child, whichever side of the country they end up in.
Please help if you can
Children’s provision is missing, partial or precarious now. For providers, unresolved approvals and uncertainty over payment can mean being unable to retain specialist staff, reserve places or continue delivering support. Once that capacity is lost, issuing the paperwork may not bring it back.
Judicial review is acutely time-sensitive. As individual cases are resolved or circumstances change, the opportunity to bring the underlying practices before a court can narrow… even while other families continue to experience the same failures.
We therefore need to bring the evidence and suitable lead cases together and move to pre-action quickly. Every contribution will help fund the vital legal work needed to test the evidence and prepare a potential challenge.
Please donate if you can, and share this campaign with families, educators, providers, disability-rights supporters and anyone who believes that public bodies must be accountable to the law.
Children should not have to depend on their families’ capacity to fight, attract public attention or threaten legal action to receive provision that the law has already said must be secured.
When the law says “must”, a public authority cannot treat it as “maybe”.
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Who we are
Measure What Matters is a small, independent public-accountability initiative. We use open-source data, documentary evidence and testimony to examine the gap between what public services promise and what people experience.
Our work is evidence-led and non-party-political. Over the past year, we have gathered more than 2,000 accounts from families across England experiencing serious maladministration in the SEND System and taken that evidence directly to Parliament, the Department for Education and the national media.
Our strategy is simple: we bring evidence, analysis and lived experience together to identify where public services are falling short, and use public scrutiny, media engagement, political advocacy and legal action to secure accountability and the change communities need. For this proposed challenge, we have brought families and education providers together, documented recurring failures, examined the processes behind them and escalated our findings to those responsible.
We are now placing that evidence before specialist lawyers to establish the basis for systemic legal action.
Disabled Children’s Rights are Under Attack.
We’re fighting, but we can’t do it alone: we need your help more than ever.
We’re volunteer-run, but costs are rising. To help us keep going, please consider a one-off or, if it’s possible, a regular donation.
Read more about being a regular donor here.
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Key Content
Also read:
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- Big ideas belong to everyone: Education, rights and lifelong learning for people with learning disabilities
- As The Guardian prints our joint campaign’s open letter, it’s clear people with lived experience don’t want to lose SEND rights
- How do you ensure pathways to education, health, and social care support, meet both diagnosis and needs?
- Researching flexi-schooling: How beneficial is it for children with SEND?
- Oops, we did it again… The Government must now listen to more than 100,000 people who do not want to lose SEND rights
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- Could using AI to filter Government consultation responses lead to “algorithmic silencing” of neurodivergent voices?
- A council’s “improvement journey”? How determined SEND parents catalogued the trail of their LA’s unlawful behaviour
- Research: Social networks in special schools. Friendships, bullying and play
- CrowdJustice SEND accountability: When the law says “must”, local authorities cannot treat it as “maybe”
- CrowdJustice SEND accountability: When the law says “must”, local authorities cannot treat it as “maybe”
- The toxic culture of obstruction that’s taken root inside England’s council SEND services is not only unchecked, it’s encouraged
- Not in our name: How manufacturing consent for proposed SEND reforms has broken the social contract.
- The Government doesn’t care about your views of the SEND Tribunal—it’s already decided to kneecap it. We must not accept it
- Part 2: The Testimonies. Children died; the system looked away. Will government SEND reforms make this scandal even worse?
- Children died. The system looked away. Today, the Government is calling the human cost of cutting rights, “reform” [Part 1]
- MP says the abuse of SEND law is a “systemic, moral and ethical crisis” and schools must speak up
- The missing evidence of systemic maladministration in SEND—Teachers speak out Educators, share your experiences!
- The 1% club: LAs win almost none of 25k SEND appeals, at an indefensible cost of over £200m. Plus, a shocking announcement
- The law on SEND isn’t failing, it’s been systematically undermined from within, says independent public accountability group
- 55% rise in 2024 SEND Tribunal appeals. LAs’ 1.3% success rate cost £153m. The cost to families? Incalculable
- A record rise in SEND appeals, and challenges for teachers accessing school support. Things are not getting better…
- Post-16: mental capacity and the SEND Tribunal
- Does the SEND Tribunal have to pay attention to the views, wishes and feelings of the child?
- Scrapping the SEND Tribunal would cover up injustice and no parent of a disabled child will ever support it
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- CrowdJustice SEND accountability: When the law says “must”, local authorities cannot treat it as “maybe” - September 25, 2026
- The toxic culture of obstruction that’s taken root inside England’s council SEND services is not only unchecked, it’s encouraged - July 3, 2026
- Not in our name: How manufacturing consent for proposed SEND reforms has broken the social contract. - March 23, 2026
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