Earlier this week, I was one of a number of parents and charity representatives to give evidence to the first oral hearing of the (second) Commons Education Committee SEND Inquiry. The Committee Chair, Helen Hayes, said they deliberately designed the oral sessions to hear first from parents and charities that support parents to “set a context for questions” for further hearings in the inquiry. This is encouraging. Ms Hayes knows the SEND brief well from her previous pre-election position as opposition SEND spokesperson.
Unusually, members were joined by members of the Health and Social Care Committee, so you would have thought it would be standing room only for the MPs in attendance. Alas, this was not the case— perhaps the members had more urgent things to attend to, or perhaps parental representatives and charities were not who they wished to question. Nevertheless, thank you to those who did attend and ask questions, we hope it was a useful session.
The oral evidence session
The hearing was in two sessions. Unusually, the parliamentary website has turned off downloads, so we can’t split it up into segments, so to watch the whole thing, visit Parliament TV here.
We do have one clip we’ve shared on our socials, however, of me speaking about accountability. There was so much to say, but not a lot of time to say it. As well as some thoughts about the Tribunal (see below), I managed to include thoughts on teacher training, SENCOs needing to not be made to manage too many roles to enable them to concentrate on their SEND duties, plus increasing and ring-fencing the SEND delegated budget. As well as me, there were other powerful and passionate speakers such as Agnes Agyepong, CEO and founder of Global Black Maternal Health and our friend and new columnist, Imogen Steele, Policy and Public Affairs Officer at Contact. You can find more quotes in this Tes article
Another (short) parliamentary SEND debate
SEND/Schools Minister, Catherine McKinnell faced more SEND questions in the Commons earlier this week, but didn’t really answer any of them— something we became accustomed to with the previous government. For example, Helen Hayes’ asked about ensuring all DfE spending on new schools and refurbishments, “helps to make schools more inclusive?” Perhaps Ms Hayes was seeking an undertaking that funding given out would include a stipulation that buildings must be designed with accessibility in mind. If so, she was to be disappointed.
Ms McKinnell’s response was, “We are making progress by investing £1 billion into SEND, and £740 million into creating more inclusive specialist places in mainstream schools and undertaking the adaptations that may be required in mainstream schools to make them more accessible.” Essentially, “specialist inclusive places” means resource bases or units (which may or may not count as inclusive mainstream), but no guarantee that accessibility will be mandated in new or refurbished buildings (including those affected by RAAC). If this is the case, we would urge the Department to ensure that any new contracts are indeed dependent on plans being accessible—then we really can be sure we are ‘making progress’.
As a side note, while the new Government brought SEND into the remit of the Schools Minister under Ms McKinnell, perhaps it is time for SEND to have its own cross-departmental ambassador, working alongside both Ms McKinnell under the schools’ remit, and Stephen Kinnock MP, whose DHSC remit includes children’s health and social care. A sort of Children’s SEND “Jiminy Cricket” if you will, ensuring SEND is never again an afterthought.
Does the Ombudsman really offer accountability for families?
The clip above that we shared on our social media yesterday attracted comments about how the Ombudsman doesn’t offer the accountability parents want. And they do have a point. While the SEND Tribunal is for appealable decisions relating to EHCPs and discrimination, the Ombudsman investigates complaints about maladministration and service failures by public bodies. It won’t investigate decisions that could have been heard by the SEND Tribunal or very late complaints. It can find “fault” with a public body’s decisions and award a “remedy”—what really amounts to token sums in compensation for what it decides is “injustice”.
Injustice to the Ombudsman is a very different thing to how injustice is seen and felt by families. If fault is found —and it is in 92% of cases for SEND decisions—behind that is a year or more of chasing the council with a complaint before it gets to the LGSCO. And behind that is a child whose needs have not been met, or who has been without an education entirely. How is that not an injustice?
What do you think would be a suitable remedy? A much larger fine? What do you do if they ignore the findings, as sometimes happens? Let us know in the comments below.
Is the SEND Tribunal adversarial?
Local authorities have been increasingly public about their clear wish to get rid of, or knee-cap, the SEND Tribunal. They broke cover with this aim in the guise of the ISOS so-called “independent” report, funded by the Local Government Association and the County Councils Network. Since then, we’ve seen them repeat this publicly in various forms, such as a suggestion to stop refusal to assess appeals in the LGA response to a Tribunal consultation, and branding the Tribunal “adversarial” in this article. So you can guarantee these bodies are lobbying the government hard behind the scenes.
But, to reiterate the point I made in the Inquiry hearing, the SEND Tribunal, whatever local authority representative bodies try to reframe as “adversarial” merely applies the law. The fact that only 1.3% of cases go councils’ way is no reason to loosen their statutory duties. The law is there for a reason—to protect disabled children and their families. If councils cannot or will not meet the legal requirements, they need to learn more about the law, improve their decision-making and put the blame where it truly lies. In case they’re not sure, it’s definitely not the fault of parents but should be laid squarely at the door of past governments for not properly costing out and budgeting for the Children and Families Act into the long term.
You absolutely cannot blame families for taking up new rights to statutory support for under fives and young people aged 16-25. They are doing nothing wrong. Neither can you blame the law itself—even the SEND Improvement Plan states the 2014 reforms were the right ones. Austerity measures and lack of foresight pretty much guaranteed councils’ inner conflict between doing the right thing for families and doing what their bottom line dictates. No surprise for which one wins.
Short extension to SEND Inquiry
A final note: If you haven’t got your response in for the Inquiry yet, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s had a short extension to February 6th. Our response is long, yours doesn’t have to be. Write your ideas for improving SEND provision—what changes to SEND would improve your child’s life, or how could SEND provision be improved where you work? Do you have a crisis-busting idea? Just send that, even if its only a few paragraphs— just get your voice heard.
Tell us in the comments what your thoughts are.
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Also read:
- What makes an autism assessment report genuinely useful to a school?
- 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
- Experts at Hand: When is an occupational therapist also a SEND expert?
- 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
What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?May 16, 2025
The SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper reveal rights given, and rights stripped awayFebruary 24, 2026
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She is a rare disease & chronic pain patient advocate with Ehlers Danlos syndrome.
- Oops, we did it again… The Government must now listen to more than 100,000 people who do not want to lose SEND rights - October 1, 2026
- Could using AI to filter Government consultation responses lead to “algorithmic silencing” of neurodivergent voices? - September 30, 2026
- DfE must give its SEND reform Child Rights Impact Assessment a do-over; this time, without marking its own homework - September 24, 2026
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