The Ombudsman wants to investigate complaints about schools: Will the government listen?

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Last week, England’s Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) issued a triennial review report. Every three years, LGSCO surveys its complaints caseload and makes recommendations to central and local government about what it sees.

Special educational needs and disability issues featured strongly in this report – and LGSCO had some eye-catching recommendations to make.

What is LGSCO?

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman is the final port of call for complaints about local government and adult social care services. If you have a complaint about SEND services (including transport) that involves maladministration, once you’ve effectively exhausted all the council complaints procedures, you can then complain to the LGSCO. There is no charge for this. We’ve run a few posts about the LGSCO in the last few years— see our list at the end of this article

It may be free, but in practice, as a SEND parent, it requires a lot of stamina to see an LGSCO complaint through. The process is not quick, and LGSCO won’t handle all SEND complaints.

If the Ombudsman believes your complaint could have been resolved by appealing to the SEND First-Tier Tribunal (SENDIST), they won’t take it on. If you’re in the middle of an appeal to SENDIST, the LGSCO won’t investigate anything they consider is closely connected to that appeal. And if LGSCO sees no route to a meaningful remedy, or thinks the council’s already done enough, they may drop the case.

But if it takes your case on, the LGSCO will investigate and come to a decision. If it finds the local authority to be at fault, it often instructs it to provide a remedy.

For SEND cases, that will often involve the LA making a payment to the complainant. However, the amounts are almost invariably far less than the LA would have spent by delivering the SEND provision when they should have. Sometimes payments are purely symbolic.

You can find a grim set of guidelines here, showing what monetary value the LGSCO places on missing education. The recompense for a child missing education each term is less than some SEND consultants currently charge per day.

If LA maladministration is bad enough in a particular area, the LGSCO might ask the council to review its processes and improve them. Councils usually pay at least lip service to these recommendations, but not always.

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What does the LGSCO’s Triennial Review say about SEND?

The current Ombudsman is Amerdeep Somal. Her review is blunt and damning about the quality of SEND service delivery by local government. She describes LGSCO’s education casework as “dominated” by complaints about SEND.

Over one in four of all complaints made to the LGSCO in the last financial year (2023-24) were about SEND provision.
The LGSCO finds fault by local authorities in 92% of the SEND cases that they investigate, and the number of SEND cases is increasing rapidly.

It’s important to remember these statistics are effectively a lagging indicator: in volume, they mostly tell us what was going wrong in 2021 and 2022, not now.

LGSCO complaints are grinding bureaucratic processes that investigate someone else’s grinding bureaucratic processes. That means there’s always a long time between a local authority’s act of maladministration and the LGSCO officially opining on it. Sometimes, it’s a year: more often, it’s up to two years. In extreme cases where multiple acts of maladministration have occurred, it can be over five years.

The LGSCO see two key issues in their SEND casework:

Local authority failures to complete new EHCPs and EHCP annual reviews on time;
Local authority failures to deliver the provision set out in EHCPs.

It’s worth restating this is a product of the LGSCO’s deliberately narrow remit. There is all manner of assessment and Tribunal-related skulduggery the Ombudsman—by choice—does not look at.

The conclusion the LGSCO comes to is one shared by every public sector body that works in, or has looked at SEND:

“Our evidence strongly indicates that the system is not working for children, families or local authorities: resources are a challenge, many organisations lack vital staff and in many areas suitable and affordable support does not exist. The result is that young people, and their families, don’t get the help they need and lose vital weeks, months and years of education and development as a result. They don’t get that time back. No-one wins in the current system.”
Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

And like many other public bodies, the LGSCO is recommending big change:

“This situation will not be resolved without system-wide changes on a national scale, requiring cross Government working as highlighted by the National Audit Office.”

So what does the LGSCO recommend?

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The pitch for change

The LGSCO isn’t making any specific recommendations for system-wide SEND reform. But it is recommending changes to its own remit that would see it investigating maladministration in schools as well as local authorities.

The Ombudsman notes the “routes of redress in this area [SEND] are also extremely complex, with numerous bodies responsible for different parts of the system and some individuals having no routes to redress.”

LGSCO’s remit currently stops at the school gate. For a school under LA control, “the only remedy after a complaint to the school, and the council if the school is maintained, is to complain to the Department for Education”. The Ombudsman wants this changed:

“Giving LGSCO the ability to look at the actions of all state-funded schools to identify and provide additional support where it is needed, as well as fulfilling EHC Plan requirements and key decisions around admissions and exclusions, would simplify the system for parents, schools and local authorities. It would bring accountability and also provide a more comprehensive overview of what is and is not working in respect of the provision of education services.”
Amerdeep Somal, LGSCO

More broadly, the LGSCO notes it can currently take complaints about admissions and exclusions for LA-maintained schools, but not for academies and free schools. The Ombudsman says that “this is neither logical nor is it fair.”

This isn’t the first time that the Ombudsman has made this pitch. The previous Ombudsman argued for it during the 2018-19 Education Select Committee inquiry. That Committee firmly agreed with him, but the previous government did not. LGSCO also asked for a similar extension of powers in their last triennial review in 2021.

This renewed pitch for extended powers to review SEND complaints and maladministration puts the new government on the spot. Ministers have repeatedly talked about the importance of mainstream education for SEND pupils, and the importance of SEND pupils feeling that they belong in mainstream schools. Ministers say they want to improve this key part of SEND service delivery, and many people are inclined to take them at their word.

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Will the renewed call get results?

So, will the LGSCO’s new call succeed? Probably not, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the pitch will be about as welcome as an outbreak of anthrax for the state school sector and education unions. They already consider themselves under accountability siege from Ofsted, and they’re already bracing for some type of ham-fisted inclusion-based SEND criterion in a revised Ofsted inspection framework to come next year. The last thing they will want is an outside agency poking around at an individual case level.
Secondly, if you’re a regular reader here (if not, why not?), you won’t have failed to notice the emphasis that SEND system leaders are currently placing on “parent confidence”. Aside from the LGSCO, the last thing those leaders want to see right now is more hard evidence that low parental confidence is a function of genuine maladministration, rather than vibes-based whimsy.
Finally, there are real questions about whether the LGSCO has enough capacity to handle the additional remit it’s asking for. Its budget for the next three years won’t be known until next year, but its funding has been steadily cut ever since 2010.

The LGSCO is already struggling to cope with the caseload it’s got on local authority SEND maladministration complaints. There is good evidence to indicate the Ombudsman has raised the threshold for investigation so they can cope. School-level investigations will be much more complex—because the legal framework for assessing what qualifies as “fault” is much more complex.

There is an accountability gap here, particularly for pupils with SEND who don’t have an EHCP. But it’s very unlikely it’ll be filled the way the Ombudsman is asking for.

Also read:

The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reformsSeptember 9, 2026Special Needs Jungle

Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SENAugust 4, 2026Tania Tirraoro

Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really mattersJuly 22, 2026Matt Keer

Research: SEND case officers are LAs’ “human shield” gatekeepers. But parents shouldn’t have to be their own key workersSeptember 22, 2026Sharon Smith

EOTAS Consultation: A further assault on children's SEND rights with cost saving and reintegration to schools at its heartJuly 15, 2026Tania Tirraoro

Experts at Hand: When is an occupational therapist also a SEND expert?September 30, 2026Special Needs Jungle

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Matt Keer

Matt (he/him) has two deaf children. He has over 20 years of experience grappling with the SEND system as a parent, and he’s seen the best and the worst that the SEND system offers.
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.

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