Mid-December normally means just one thing in the SNJ stats gimp lair – the arrival of a fresh set of annual data about the activities of the Special Educational Needs and Disability First-Tier Tribunal (SENDIST).
This year though, things are a bit different. The whiff of reform is in the air. This morning, the Government announced a chunky £3 billion investment in SEND placements. We’ll have more on this next week once there are proper details. But so far, it looks like they’re hoping to create a lot more places, with less funding per head than the last government invested—while also canning a lot of planned special schools.
We’ll be crunching the numbers on this over the next few days but for now, SNJ’s Directors have provided their own reaction:
“While ordinarily, money for SEND—especially such a large amount—is to be celebrated, this announcement is not a good sign for disabled children’s rights. To make this announcement just after the Government launches a series of events, apparently discussing how to proceed, reveals just how little they value parental views. It’s now looking hollow and calculated. The truth is that the important decisions have already been made and are being implemented.
“SNJ has been discussing this direction of travel for months. Some have claimed we’re too cynical and inflexible on disabled children’s rights. But here we are, with a clear indication that the government has given up on any sense of meaningful mainstream inclusion or finding ways to meet the needs of those currently being failed by the education system.
“The government has caved to the demands of the very local authorities who—as we can see with these Tribunal stats—are blatantly and routinely flouting the law and abusing families.
“While some parents look at units positively, many others feel their children have been warehoused, isolated, learning little, and traumatised in these spaces. Separating children who can only attend for an hour or two in the main school is simply not inclusion. Yet the government is doubling down without any plan for therapies, skilled staff or safeguarding. Diverting money from desperately needed special schools into poorly-evidenced mainstream ‘units’ ignores inquiry findings, expert warnings and the countless families who have demonstrated through lived experience that this model is unsafe.
“Segregating disabled children in a single classroom (or portacabin) within mainstream schools without rights, choices, or appropriate support may be cheap and convenient, but it’s also wrong and regressive. But obviously, it does have the benefit of protecting mainstream children from having to engage with their disabled peers and having their school’s league table results impacted.
“This week, several members of our team attended some of the ‘conversation’ events and we’ve heard from other parents who did too. They heard RPs and units repeatedly positioned as “inclusion”. This announcement shows the Government’s mind was made up long before parents entered the room.
This is fast becoming the biggest organised gaslighting of SEND parents this country has ever seen. We urge Georgia Gould to please think again, follow the evidence, and use this money to create the local, specialist provision parents actually want. We call on MPs to follow through from their debate speeches to protect disabled children’s rights, before it’s too late.
Special Needs Jungle Directors
Back to Matt…
A SEND convermonolgue
As you read, families like us are in the middle of a ‘conversation’ with the Department for Education about SEND reform. It’s not what most people would call a conversation, though. If you tried to direct a conversation this way during a speech and language therapy assessment, the therapist would be scribbling furiously about the client presenting with a severe social and pragmatic language disorder.
That means these Tribunal stats are coming at an awkward time for SEND reformers. SENDIST data shines a clear light on the quality of official SEND decision-making—not just at the strategic level, but at the operational level where it really affects individuals.
This year’s figures show—again—that SEND decision-making has never been worse. It’s not just bad in its own right – it’s worse than any other English first-tier tribunal domain where public sector decisions are examined.
And 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 sign whatsoever that they learn anything from the experience.
If you’re optimistic—or if government pays you by billable hours—then this is all just a system design flaw. These are invisible, impersonal forces that make Good Chaps do Bad Things, but in a rational way. It’ll all disappear once the system has been reformed.
If you’re pessimistic, or, frankly, if you have experience with a needs-led part of public service whose leadership doesn’t permit or promote this behaviour—then we’re looking at the Stewart Pearson theory of reform (sound on, but NSFW).
With this theory, system design is a red herring. The problem is the organisational cultures, personal preferences, and carefully cultivated blind spots of the cadre of leaders who are in charge of it,—along with the operational practitioners who implement their wishes. Under this theory, unless everyone changes their mindset, they’ll shank it under any system you care to design.
What’s SENDIST?
If you’re new to SEND, then here’s some background:
- SENDIST is a legal first-tier tribunal where families can appeal against a specified range of local authority decisions that affect their children or young people. It also hears appeals about particular types of disability discrimination too.
- These LA decisions revolve around the Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) process. EHCPs are statutory plans that are supposed to underpin support for many children and young people with SEND, but they may well be destined for the glue factory soon.
- There are specific parts of the EHCP process where it’s possible to appeal to SENDIST about a local authority decision: for example, if your LA refuses to assess your child to see whether they need an EHCP, if they refuse to issue an EHCP, or if there are otherwise-unresolvable disputes about the content of the plan.
- There are other parts of this process though where you can’t appeal to SENDIST – for example, if no-one’s put in place the provision that’s specified in the EHCP.
- The Tribunal doesn’t arbitrate, and it’s not a marriage guidance councillor. 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. Its decisions and outcomes have nothing to do with parental feelings, and very little to do with parental preference.
- Families don’t really ‘win’ Tribunal appeals. If they’re successful (usually at huge personal cost, often not financial), then what they’ve won is the same right to an appropriate education that most families of children without SEND can happily take for granted.
All clear? On with the numberwang. If you’ve not got much time (or you have got a life), then check Tania’s handy infographic at the bottom (and throughout).
This Year’s Data
Yesterday’s figures cover the 2024-25 academic year, so they’re current up to the end of August 2025.
The number of SENDIST appeals and hearings has been increasing steadily for years, and continued to rise at a high rate in 2024-25 too.
- Families registered just over 25,000 appeals with the SEND First Tier Tribunal in the 2024-25 academic year – 18% up on the previous year. That’s a slower rate of increase than last year – but it’s still the largest number of appeals ever recorded in a single year, and it’s nearly eight times the number of annual appeals registered when the current SEND system was launched back in 2014.
- In 2024-25, roughly one in 10 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 nearly 20,000 appeals through to completion in 2024-25. That’s 19% up on last year: the largest total ever, and a number that’s five times larger than 2014-15—but the growth rate is slower than last year.
- Two-thirds of these appeals went all the way to a formal Tribunal hearing, without being settled beforehand. The number of SENDIST appeals decided this way is now 16 times larger than it was when the SEND reforms began in 2014. Going to hearing is a slow process, and local authorities have resisted the Tribunal’s efforts to streamline procedures to make things quicker.
- Most families who appeal to SENDIST are already in the EHCP system. As has been the case for years now, the most common types of appeal are disputes about the contents of a plan (64%), rather than the process of getting a needs assessment or securing a plan (33%).
- When families appeal about the contents of their child or young person’s EHCP, these days they are mostly contesting the placement that the LA has decided on – the school, college, or other education setting.
- Some of the meteoric rise in SENDIST appeals reflects the overall rise in EHCP numbers—but not much of it. The number of children and young people with statutory plans has more than doubled in a decade, but the number of SENDIST appeals has grown nearly eightfold in the same period.
What do appeal outcomes look like, and how much does this cost the public purse?
In 2024-25, SENDIST panels upheld the local authority’s original decision in 149 of the 14,009 appeals that went to a full hearing. That’s an LA success rate of 1.1% – 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 £200 million in the 2024-25 academic year alone, and over £800 million since the current SEND system started in 2014.
We estimate that in aggregate, LAs allocated £193 million of resources to Tribunal appeal defence in 2024-25.
- Since the SEND reforms started in September 2014, we estimate that LAs have consumed over £770 million of resource defending SENDIST tribunals, scoring an average 3% success rate at hearings over that period.
- There are wider costs that other people and organisations have to bear so that local authorities can bask in the glory of a 1%-3% decision success rate:
- The additional wider costs to the public purse probably run into the tens of millions of pounds per year, according to academic research.
- Department for Education payments data shows that the Department paid HM Courts & Tribunals Service £13.5 million in the 2024-25 academic year to help keep SENDIST going.
There’s no reliable way to calculate the financial and human cost to families of going through a SENDIST appeal. This is a process which invariably takes months (and sometimes more than a year), often with the LA conceding at the last minute. But the toll it takes is huge – and families’ ability to bear it often depends on the resources at their disposal.
What’s the common factor?
This is an astonishingly wasteful process. But is it an outlier? How do SENDIST outcomes compare to other parts of the public sector whose decisions can be appealed at a First Tier Tribunal? And how does it compare to other bodies that review SEND decisions?
- The Home Office’s immigration department is no-one’s idea of a well-functioning organisation with a healthy and efficient decision-making culture: its own minister describes it as “not yet fit for purpose.” Half of the Home Office’s department’s decisions were upheld at immigration first-tier tribunals in 2024-25. That’s arguably not a great performance – but it’s more than 40 times better than local authority SEND services managed at first-tier tribunal hearings in the same period.
- Most of the Department of Work and Pensions disability benefits decisions that get examined by a first tier tribunal were overturned in 2024-25. But depending on the benefit in question, DWP performance at tribunal was 30-40 times better than local authority SEND services.
Is it something very specific to do with the SENDIST tribunal setup? Almost certainly not.
A whopping great clue here is SEND complaint outcomes at the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. The LGSCO and SENDIST both look at local authority SEND administration and decisions, but their casework does not overlap at all. The LGSCO will not look at any SEND issue if it’s appealable to SENDIST, and they’ve gone all the way to the High Court to defend that principle.
The Venn diagram here is two separate circles. There is no overlap. Despite that, for the SEND complaints that the LGSCO actively investigates, the current local authority no-fault rate was just 8% in 2024 – and that rate is falling rapidly.
There’s a glaringly obvious common denominator here. The Tribunal is not some rarefied outlier. The piss-poor quality of local government SEND decision-making is the outlier, even when compared to some of Whitehall’s most notorious performers.
What happens next?
If you’ve got this far, you’ll already know that the government is planning some type of deep-rooted SEND reform. Other than this new announcement, the so-called ‘conversation’ has yet to reveal any substantive detail about what’s to come, including the role of the SEND Tribunal.
The Department for Education plans to say something in a Schools White Paper that’s already been postponed a couple of times. It’s currently rumoured for release in early January 2026. Or late January. Or spring. We have no idea what it’ll say.
Parliament’s Education Committee conducted a SEND inquiry this year. In their inquiry report, they stated that:
“We are deeply concerned by the number of local authorities found to have failed to meet their statutory obligations at the SEND Tribunal. [A previous] 97 per cent loss rate for Tribunal cases suggests a pattern of non-compliance which is unacceptable, particularly given that the entitlements of children and young people with SEND are clearly set out in the existing legislative framework. Greater efforts are needed to prevent cases from escalating to SEND Tribunals by prioritising good partnership working with parents and carers, effective mediation and ensuring local authorities have the resources and the powers to fulfil their statutory obligations.”
Solving The SEND Crisis report, Education Select Committee 2025
The Committee recommended that:
“The SEND Tribunal must remain as a backstop of the accountability process. The Department for Education and Department of Health and Social Care must systematically monitor SEND Tribunal outcomes and identify local authorities that repeatedly fail to comply with their statutory duties. The Government should mandate the framework for reporting SEND Tribunal data and undertake focused work with poor performing local authorities to understand why they are so often failing to uphold their statutory duties and support them through resourcing and targeted intervention, including specialised training, to address underlying issues and ensure that the rights of children and young people with SEND are upheld. The SEND White Paper should explicitly identify and set out plans to address any structural or resource-related barriers to effective support.”
Solving The SEND Crisis report, Education Select Committee 2025
Thus far, the government has refused to confirm that SENDIST will survive their upcoming reforms. But yesterday, they published their response to the Education Committee’s SEND inquiry report. The response had the following to say about SENDIST:
“We recognise the need for clear, independent routes of redress, retaining the SEND Tribunal as an important legal backstop for families who are unable to find resolution earlier in the process. We agree with the Committee that local authorities and education settings should prioritise good partnership working with families. All parties should work closely and collaboratively to develop solutions to their disagreements, so that children or young people get the support they need quicker without the need for a Tribunal appeal…
Solving The SEND Crisis report, Education Select Committee 2025
“… We will work closely with the [LGSCO] and the Tribunal to determine their roles in a reformed SEND system. In the meantime, I would like to place on record my thanks for the continued work that the Ombudsman and Tribunal do for families of children and young people with SEND.”
That’s not a guarantee that SENDIST will survive in its current form. And the range of things that SENDIST might get to rule on in a reformed system could be very different. If EHCP entitlement is abolished or restricted, a change to SENDIST’s powers will almost certainly follow.
But it’s a long way short of a decision to abolish the Tribunal entirely, something that’ll go down like a cup of lukewarm Ebola among many of our intrepid SEND system leaders.
As a near-perfect illustration of the wider challenge that reform faces, the current President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services recently gave a speech, (Rachel Wardell, EDCSSurrey) where she commented on the perceived failings of the First Tier SEND Tribunal:
“Reforming the routes of [SEND] redress will be necessary. In no other part of the public sector can a Tribunal overrule a professional, multi-agency assessment and direct a local authority to meet a parental preference, without any consideration of resource or alternative appropriate provisions… … Until there is a change in legislation, supported by alignment of responsibilities, accountabilities and funding across the system, nothing of significance will change.”
Rachel Wardell, President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services; Executive Director for Children, Families and Lifelong Learning at Surrey County Council
This statement was delivered in front of a conference audience made up of other system leaders. And it’s fundamentally inaccurate.
Other Tribunals can and do override professional multi-agency assessments: the Mental Health First Tier Tribunal, for example.
The extent and limits of parental preference are clearly set out in law. SENDIST panels do consider resource or alternative appropriate provisions during hearings: they don’t just wave through parental preference.
If the ADCS President wants to verify this, all she has to do is read some of the thousands of SENDIST decision notices that her local authority has racked up in recent years, where the resource consideration exercise that SENDIST conducts is clearly laid out. If you want to see how that exercise is conducted, read this.
It’s unclear whether this statement was made out of ignorance, but evidence collected by the public accountability pressure group Measure What Matters strongly suggests that ignorance is not the problem here. We’ll have more on this next week from MWM.
Suffer the little disabled children
If legal rights are whittled down, if future outcomes for children and young people with SEND increasingly rest on the professionalism and core values of the same apparatchiks who led the current system over the cliff, then read everything above, and ask yourself how it’s going to function on little more than bullshit-infused hubris.
As Stewart Pearson almost said in The Thick of It, you can spend 11 years detoxifying the SEND system. It’s a bit like renovating an old, old house. You can take out an adversarial beam here, a perversely incentivising window there, replace the odd parent-blaming roof tile. But after a while, you realise that this renovation is doomed.
Because the foundations are built on what you can only describe as a solid bed of arrogance and maladministration.
The SNJ SEND Tribunal Infographic 2025
Disabled Children’s Rights are Under Attack.
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Also read:
- Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document
- The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reforms
- How health and family support systems are failing children starting school
- 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
- Navigating constraints: Why a former PCF chair thinks the current model is missing the mark for families
- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them”
- EHCPs 2026: A relentless rise, but who’s surprised? Plus SNJ’s annual LA Hall of Shame
- SEND 2026: Tracking a decade of rising need with earlier EHCPs and moves to specialist provision for secondary
- The Government thinks Ofsted will ensure SEND reform accountability. This evidence suggests ‘significant concern’.
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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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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