By Samuel Moss, Barrister, 39 Essex Chambers
A fab giveaway today: Making Lawful Decisions: a guide for decision-makers on acting within the law by Victoria Butler-Cole KC and Steve Broach KC, provides decision-makers with clear and accessible guidance on the requirements of lawful decision-making. From the initial preparatory stages, through any hearing and producing the decision, to remedies where decisions are made unlawfully, the book is a practical guide that provides a quick and simple reference point to the law for decision-makers of every kind.
It covers key controversial legal issues, including the public sector equality duty and human rights obligations and allows decision-makers – including those who are not legally trained – to understand the key requirements of lawful decision-making without taking costly legal advice.
Best of all, we have one to give away – form at the end. But first, find out more if this would be a useful book for you with this summary from barrister Samuel Moss…
The book everyone needs to understand lawful decision-making in SEND— précis by Samuel Moss
In his foreword to this invaluable new handbook Making Lawful Decisions, Lord Justice Singh reminds us the law can be confusing. For no one is this truer than for people with SEND and those helping them navigate the SEND system.
Victoria Butler-Cole KC and Steve Broach KC have made that just that little bit simpler by setting out, concisely and precisely, the requirements for lawful decision-making. Compiled and contributed to by barristers at a leading chambers with extensive experience of challenging and defending decisions, this new handbook will be an essential reference for anyone seeking to ensure decision-making takes place lawfully.
As readers of Special Needs Jungle will know, the types of decisions governed by the principles discussed in Making Lawful Decisions can have a dramatic impact on the individuals and groups concerned. From school exclusions to the assessment of health, care and education needs. From the provision of education, transportation and accommodation support to funding decisions by local authorities on mental health and other services. Not to mention all the other decisions that must be taken in accordance with these principles. These decisions can significantly affect individuals’ interests and it is therefore essential they are taken properly.
How the law works
Central to any discussion about lawful decision-making is an important distinction drawn out in the authors’ introductory comments:
“The law does not purport to tell decision-makers what to decide. The law is primarily concerned with how decisions are made.”
Given the high stakes involved, it is understandable that affected individuals and groups focus on the justice or correctness of the outcome. However, this book reminds us that the law is concerned with the decision-making process itself. As Lord Justice Singh remarks, the book is “a very readable introduction to the legal duties and processes which are expected of decision-makers.”
An accessible guide
For both decision-makers and those impacted by decisions, neither of which groups may be legally trained, Making Lawful Decisions is an important and accessible guide to the essential components and characteristics of lawful decision-making. Chapter One provides a clear checklist setting out the core ingredients of lawful decision-making at each stage, including:
- What are the decision-maker’s powers?
- How should the possibility of bias or conflicts of interest be dealt with?
- Which questions need to be decided?
- What evidence will be required?
- What procedures should be followed?
- How will the decision be explained?
- What if the decision is challenged?
Aimed at improving lawful decicions
By addressing the book to decision-makers, Victoria Butler-Cole and Steve Broach seek to improve the general quality of the decision-making process itself. Of course, this is beneficial to both decision-makers and those impacted by decisions. Ensuring that decisions are taken lawfully in a way that safeguards essential principles of fairness, reduces the likelihood of those decisions being challenged. For example, ensuring that an affected party has the opportunity to make meaningful representations means individuals and groups feel properly involved in the decision-making process. Similarly, giving adequate reasons for a decision not only ensures that decision-makers ask themselves the right questions and have regard to relevant considerations and evidence, but it also ensures that those affected can understand why a certain decision has been taken.
Although not a guide to challenging decisions, it nevertheless serves as a useful checklist for understanding how the decision-making process works and what to expect, or even request, at each stage. As we know, the reality remains that some decisions will need to be challenged, and this book’s approach to cataloguing the essential components of lawful decision-making makes the task of identifying avenues of challenges all that much simpler. Chapter seven also contains a useful overview of how decisions might be reviewed by way of a complaint to an ombudsman or judicial review.
Fairness front and centre
Special Needs Jungle readers will hope that fairness is always at the heart of decision-making and this book also places fairness front and centre. Each chapter provides a clear and readable illustration of how fairness should characterise each stage of the process, including:
- Pre-decision consultation
- The centrality of disclosure
- The opportunity to make representations, including with legal assistance
- Additional support to facilitate participation by vulnerable individuals
- The duty to have regard to relevant considerations
- Giving reasons for decisions
- Evidence-based and rational decisions
- Consistent decisions
- Legitimate expectations.
Human rights law
Special Needs Jungle readers will find the chapters on complying with the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998 of particular interest and assistance, given that decisions impacting children and young people with special needs and disabilities will often trigger equality and human rights issues. Making Lawful Decisions surveys each of these and many other essential pillars of open, effective and lawful decision-making. People with SEND and those supporting and campaigning with them will find this book a highly useful tool to understand what the law expects of decision-makers.
The authors have not attempted an exhaustive account of the many principles underpinning lawful decision-making, but they have managed remarkably, in a short and accessible handbook for non-lawyers and lawyers alike, to summarise the wide-ranging considerations at play in a lawful decision-making process.
Making Lawful Decisions is £45.00 (plus P&P) and is available from Legal Action Group’s website in print and ebook format, or on Amazon (earns SNJ commission at no cost to you)
The giveaway is now closed.
Also read:
- Scrapping the SEND Tribunal would cover up injustice and no parent of a disabled child will ever support it
- What’s the law when a council says it can’t comply because of resource issues, though it’s “trying its best”
- Exclusion must be a last resort says EHRC as they support a family to justice over their disabled child’s treatmentHow well is the Government respecting children with SEND’s right to education?
- 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?
- Four practical tips for enforcing the ‘absolute duty’ to secure special educational provision in EHCPs
- What’s the law when a council says it can’t comply because of resource issues, though it’s “trying its best”
- What can the SEND Tribunal do if a local authority misses an EHCP appeal deadline? A case study.
- SNJ in Conversation: SEND law. Public law barrister, Steve Broach, answers your questions
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals - September 3, 2026
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children - August 28, 2026
- Have your say on the future of transport for disabled children and young people - August 25, 2026
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