By Suja Vairavanathan, Founder & Director, Natchathiram CIC
One of the things we’re passionate about at SNJ is helping families across all communities understand and access their and their child’s rights to an education that meets their needs. For some, it’s easier than for others, such as those from the South Asian and Tamil communities.
Many Tamil parents struggle with language barriers, a deep cultural deference to professional authority, and a belief that the school always knows best. The result is that children go undiagnosed for longer, families agree to part-time timetables they don’t realise they can refuse, and parents have no idea they have legal rights they can exercise. By the time they understand the system, their child has already lost years of provision.
Suja Vairavanathan is a SENCO with over a decade of experience, most recently in a specialist SEMH setting. She is also the Founder and Director of Natchathiram CIC, a National Lottery-funded organisation supporting Tamil families navigating the SEND system in England.
Suja writes on SNJ today about her experiences supporting families ensure their children, who have SEND, get the support they need.
The cultural gap in SEND that’s missing Tamil & South Asian families. By Suja Vairavanathan, Natchathiram CIC
A few years ago, I sat with a Tamil mother in her living room while she showed me a stack of letters she had never opened. They were from her son’s school. She could not read English well enough to understand them, and she had been too ashamed to ask for help. Her son was eight years old and had been struggling for three years. He had no EHCP. No diagnosis. No support plan. What he did have was a growing reputation at school for being difficult.
She had attended every parents’ evening. She had nodded along to things she did not fully understand. She had assumed the professionals knew best, and that if something were seriously wrong, someone would have told her clearly. Nobody had.
This is not an unusual story. It is, in my experience, a pattern.
A system not designed for some families
I founded Natchathiram CIC after more than a decade working as a SENCO, most recently in a specialist SEMH setting. I had seen brilliant, committed professionals working hard within a system that was simply not designed with families like the ones I grew up around in mind. When I looked at who was accessing SEND support, who knew what an EHCP was, who attended reviews with notes prepared, who appealed to the SEND Tribunal when things went wrong, the Tamil and wider South Asian community was largely absent. Not because the need wasn’t there, but because the system had made itself inaccessible.
Natchathiram, which means “star” in Tamil, now supports Tamil families across England to understand and access SEND provision for their children. What I have learned from that work is that the barriers are rarely singular; they stack up.
The language barrier is not just about translation
The most obvious barrier is language. Many Tamil families, particularly those who arrived in the UK as refugees from Sri Lanka, speak Tamil as their first or only language. Some have functional English for everyday life but struggle with the dense, acronym-heavy prose of SEND documentation. An EHCP can run to 40 pages. A tribunal notice is more than most native English speakers can easily parse.
But the language barrier is not only about translation. Even families with good spoken English frequently tell me they felt unable to speak up in professional meetings. There is a power dynamic at play. A table of professionals, the SENCO, the Educational Psychologist, the LA officer—it feels like a courtroom to someone who has been taught, culturally, to defer to authority. The meeting ends. The parents have agreed to things they did not understand, or failed to raise concerns they should have raised, because the setting made advocacy feel impossible.
I now run bilingual workshops in Tamil and English specifically because a Tamil parent will ask a question in Tamil that she would never feel comfortable asking in front of a professional. That is not a failure of confidence, it’s a rational response to an environment that has never made space for her.
What the system assumes
The SEND system, whatever its intentions, was built on a set of assumptions: that parents can read complex documents, understand their legal rights, navigate bureaucratic timelines, and advocate loudly when those rights are not met. It assumes a certain cultural relationship with institutions, one where questioning a professional is normal, where disagreement is not disrespectful, and where parents know they’re entitled to ask for what their child needs.
Many Tamil families do not share those assumptions. There is a cultural tendency to trust that the school, the doctor, the local authority will do what is right for your child. To push back feels rude, or ungrateful, or futile. One mother told me she did not appeal her son’s EHCP because she thought appealing meant she was accusing the school of doing something wrong. She did not know she was simply exercising a legal right.
This is compounded by a deep stigma around disability and additional needs within some parts of the Tamil community. Families sometimes conceal a child’s diagnosis from extended family. Some parents describe spending years explaining to grandparents that their child’s needs are neurological, not a reflection of poor parenting or bad character. That internal pressure, the need to manage the family’s perception of the child while simultaneously fighting for provision, is exhausting, and it rarely appears in any professional’s assessment of how a family is coping.
What this looks like in practice
One family I work with had been through three annual reviews without ever understanding that the review was an opportunity to challenge what was in the EHCP. They had sat in the room, smiled, and signed. By the time they came to me, the provision in the plan had actually reduced over two years, because nobody had pushed back.
Another parent, a single mother, Tamil, with English as a second language, had received a tribunal date for her daughter’s case. She had no legal representative and no advocate. She had been sent a bundle of documents she could not fully read. She told me she had considered withdrawing the appeal because the process felt designed to defeat her. We worked through it together. She did not withdraw.
These are not outliers—the families who find their way to Natchathiram are usually those who have been struggling for a long time before they reach us. The ones who never find us are the ones I think about most.
What needs to change for families such as those with Tamil & South Asian backgrounds
The SEND system needs to stop treating cultural and linguistic accessibility as an add-on. It needs to be built into how schools communicate, how reviews are conducted, how documents are written. Having an interpreter in the room is not enough if the interpreter is a family member placed in the impossible position of translating bad news to a relative, or if the professional speaks too quickly, uses jargon, and assumes the meeting is a formality.
Local authorities need to ensure that independent support, including community-based advocates who share the family’s language and cultural context, is not just theoretically available but actively signposted and funded. The fact that this work currently depends largely on charities, on grants, or on volunteers, is a structural failure.
Schools also need to examine their outreach. It’s not a coincidence if the only families turning up to SEN meetings and engaging with the process are white British families, it’s a source of information.
Why I’m trying to make a difference
Why did I take this work on? I hope this explains it: Remember the mother with the unopened letters? Her son eventually got an EHCP. It took another two years after I met her. By that point he was 10, and some of the critical early intervention window had passed. He is doing better now, but I think often about what might have been different if someone had knocked on her door three years earlier.
Natchathiram exists because I believe that every family, regardless of language, culture, or confidence, should be able to understand what their child is entitled to and have the support to fight for it. The SEND system can be navigated. But no family should have to navigate it alone, and no child should fall through its gaps simply because their family did not know the words.
About the author
Suja Vairavanathan is a SENCO with over ten years of experience, most recently in a specialist SEMH setting, and the Founder and Director of Natchathiram CIC, a National Lottery-funded organisation supporting Tamil families navigating the SEND system in England.
About Natchathiram CIC
Natchathiram CIC supports Tamil families in England to understand and access SEND provision for their children. We deliver bilingual workshops, EHCP guidance, and direct advocacy support, helping families exercise their legal rights in a system that too often leaves them behind. https://www.natchathiramcic.com
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Key Content
Also read:
- 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
- REGISTER NOW! WEBINAR on the Government’s plans to cut EHCP and EOTAS rights. With SNJ & SEND legal charity, SOS!SEN
- 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”
- Why every child deserves Portage, wherever they’re born
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters
- What schools and practitioners are missing about Tamil and South Asian families trying to navigate the SEND system.
- Should “highly valued” EHCP Independent Supporters return to help parents navigate the SEND jungle?
- Where will all the teaching assistants come from? The research exposing the reality gap in the government SEND plans
- Challenging SEND misinformation, one radio interview at a time
- Be An Ally, Not a Bystander: A Call to Action for Educators: Book Giveaway!
- SNJ in Conversation with Brian Lamb OBE: Building good parental relationships is the key to fixing SEND
- It’s time to end the “double impact” of poor experiences at the intersectionality between Race and SEND: A Call to Action!
- SNJ in Conversation with Carrie Grant: Supporting children at the intersection of SEND, Race and Gender Identity
- An Employment Passport to young people with additional needs into paid work
- SNJ Report: The casual bias and daily discrimination faced by disabled children and their families from ethnic and marginalised communities
- Coproduction is an illusion for parents and SENCOs
- “Show me the evidence” Part 2: The questions parents should ask about SEND assessment and provision
Let's write the true narrative of the SEND reform proposals: We want your unfiltered-by-AI viewsJune 23, 2026
REGISTER NOW! WEBINAR on the Government's plans to cut EHCP and EOTAS rights. With SNJ & SEND legal charity, SOS!SENAugust 17, 2026
When “fine” at school isn’t fine at home: the hidden cost of autistic masking on familiesJune 16, 2026
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She is a rare disease & chronic pain patient advocate with Ehlers Danlos syndrome.
- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN - August 4, 2026
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them” - July 30, 2026
- EOTAS Consultation: A further assault on children’s SEND rights with cost saving and reintegration to schools at its heart - July 15, 2026
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