SNJ’s advice and prompts for submitting evidence to the 2025 Education Select Committee’s SEND Inquiry

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Last week, the House of Commons Education Select Committee announced the start of a new inquiry into the state of SEND in England. You can find SNJ’s summary of the announcement here.

It’s fair to say that the announcement was met with muted optimism by many parents we spoke to. You can watch SNJ co-director’s response on ITV news here.

The findings of the Education Select Committee’s last SEND inquiry—conducted five full years ago—remain accurate, and the problems it reported on remain unresolved. Since then, families have heard an enormous amount of talk, much of it charged to the taxpayer by the hour, but have seen very little action that’s made a difference.

What power do Select Committees have?

It’s important to remember that while this inquiry’s title is “Solving the SEND Crisis,” the Education Select Committee has no direct power to do that.

Parliamentary Select Committees observe, scrutinise, and report. They can, and do, hold officials to account. But they can’t make change happen by themselves. What followed the ESC’s 2018-19 SEND inquiry is proof of that.

All the same, if parent carers decide that this is one inquiry too far and their time and energy are too precious to waste on yet another talking shop, then there’s a downside…

Why it’s still important to respond

If parents don’t respond, there is the risk of creating a skewed result. Not responding to this inquiry leaves an open goal for groups that do not hold the best interests of disabled children and young people uppermost. These are groups that would very much like to rid themselves of the financial burden of supporting kids like ours and who are primarily interested in stopping SEND from damaging things that matter more to them. We need to keep if focused on the children at the heart of this.

These people are organised, they are well-funded, and they are very optimistic that things are now turning their way.

So, if you think things can’t get worse, trust us when we say they very much can. They might get worse even if parent carers speak up yet again. But it’s worth trying to stop that.

If you want to submit evidence to the Education Select Committee, here are a few tips on how to do that well.

1. Top tips for writing your evidence

I submitted written evidence to the Committee’s 2018-19 SEND inquiry as a parent. You can find that evidence here. The Committee was interested in knowing more about the evidence that I sent in, so I got a chance to submit oral evidence at an inquiry hearing as well.

If you want to submit your own evidence to the Education Select Committee’s new inquiry, here are some tips on how to get your evidence across in ways that might help the Committee pay more attention. We’ve also added a template to help you organise your evidence when you submit it. There’s no obligation to use any of this, but it’s there is you want to.

The Education Select Committee has provided guidance on how to submit written evidence. You can find some more general guidance here too. The deadline they’ve given for submitting written evidence is 6pm on Thursday 30^th January 2025.

Here are some key points from their guidance:

When you write in, explain who you are and why you want to submit evidence;
Keep the evidence relevant to the terms of reference of the inquiry (these are in the bullet points here – our template can help you do this);
Keep your submissions below 3,000 words if possible;
Send the submission in as a single Word document (or .odt or .rtf format if you don’t use Word);
There’s a portal for submitting evidence – it’s at the bottom of this webpage.
If you need adjustments made so that you can submit your evidence, contact the Committee’s clerks directly at educom@parliament.uk

Some trickier points that the Education Select Committee also want people to bear in mind:

Most written evidence to Parliamentary Select Committees gets published. You can ask for your evidence to be submitted confidentially and/or published anonymously – but the Committee will have the final say on whether it will;
The Committee is a public body, and has safeguarding duties. If your evidence raises any safeguarding concerns about you, or other people, then the Committee has a responsibility to raise these with the appropriate safeguarding authority;
The Education Select Committee has no power to help you with individual cases;
The Committee won’t publish evidence that refers to an ongoing legal dispute, and they don’t want to hear details of an ongoing legal case. So if you’re in the midst of a SEND Tribunal appeal, then you can send them evidence about it – but it won’t be published, and it might not be accepted, so bear this in mind before you start writing.

This is important to bear in mind…

There’s also a standing policy that might make things specifically tricky for parent carers of children and young people with SEND: The Committee may also decide not to publish evidence that includes personal information about other individuals.

Here, they’re not just referring to public officials, but also your friends and family. The Committee advises that people should focus on their individual experiences when submitting evidence. Although this is presumably designed to deter naming and shaming, interpreted literally, it could also make it very hard for parent carers to submit evidence that involves their children, many of whom cannot advocate for themselves.

The Education Select Committee says it, “will take particular care to ensure that the voices and experiences of children and young people with SEND are at the heart of our inquiry.” It’s hard to see how this would be possible if they restrict evidence from parent carers that mentions their own children.

The previous Committee’s SEND inquiry in 2018-19 took a liberal approach to what evidence they took from parent carers, and you’ll find some stark examples there of parental evidence about the SEND system’s impact on their kids. We hope the current Committee will take the same approach, but bear this in mind if you submit evidence.

2. Some more top tips for writing your SEND inquiry evidence

If you’ve decided to submit some written evidence, here are some general tips to help give your evidence some more impact:

Think about what you want the Committee to know most of all, and focus on that

If this SEND inquiry gets a similar reaction to the last one, the Education Select Committee will be receiving many hundreds of responses – potentially thousands. The Education Select Committee is supported by bright and very capable parliamentary officers. But there aren’t many of them, and they’ll be working on other Committee business too.

Because of that, it’s best to keep your responses as short as you can, while still getting your point across. The guidance advises making your submissions no longer than 3,000 words. It’s probably best to treat that word count as a ceiling, not as a target. Some of the most impactful written evidence to the 2018-19 SEND inquiry was comfortably less than 500 words.

Assume the Committee members know a bit about SEND already, but not much

The Education Select Committee is made up of MPs who will have varying experiences of SEND. They might know a bit from constituency casework, they might know a bit from local government lobbyists and trade unions, and some of them are ex-local government. A few Committee members have lived experience of disability, but not many. The parliamentary officers who support the MPs on the Committee will often be education policy wonks, but they might not have much experience down in the SEND trenches.

So when you put your evidence together, it’s best to assume that you’re writing for bright, interested people who don’t know everything about how SEND works, but want to – particularly how it affects children and young people, and particularly how official organisations behave themselves at ground level.

It’s wise to assume Committee members will have been subjected to at least some parent-blaming by officials they’ve already encountered, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they believe it all. So when you’re writing, bear all that in mind. Expand your acronyms, explain what particular things mean, explain why something hit your children hard, or why other things helped them.

Use the terms of reference to help structure what you write – and you don’t have to cover it all

The inquiry’s terms of reference shows it’ll be tackling SEND in four broad areas:

Support for children and young people with SEND
Current and future models of SEND provision
Accountability and inspection of SEND provision
Finance, funding and capacity of SEND provision

This is probably how the Committee will arrange the evidence they’ll receive, so you’ll be best off organising what you want to say under these headings. The template we’ve provided can help you do that. You don’t need to have something to say across all four topics—just pick the topics you want to write about, and go from there.

Write what’s important to you—but suggest how things can be made better:

The 2018-19 SEND inquiry concentrated on understanding what was going on, and what was going wrong. This inquiry wants to focus on solutions to a SEND crisis that the Committee already know is happening. So ground what you write in your own lived experience, explain what that experience is if you need to, but the Committee will probably be most interested in what you think needs to change for SEND to work better.

Think about how far you want to put your head above the parapet:

As stated above, you can request anonymity. You can also ask to have other details redacted (like the name of your LA, for example), and you can ask to keep your evidence entirely confidential. But bear in mind if you don’t specify otherwise, it’s likely your written evidence will eventually be posted online on the Education Select Committee’s website. The Committee will finish its work with a written report, and some of your evidence might end up being directly quoted or referenced here too.

It might be possible to send in evidence as the inquiry progresses, but pay attention to the deadline

At present, the Education Select Committee wants all written evidence by 30^th January 2025. It’s best to put your evidence together with the assumption this is a final deadline, but it might not be—the 2018-19 inquiry ended up extending the deadline as the process rumbled on.

Written evidence gets published after the submission deadline. You might find the evidence others have submitted is so egregious that you want to respond to it. The 2018-19 inquiry was willing to accept new evidence that challenged this – it’s unclear whether the 2024-25 inquiry will do the same, but it’s worth testing if you think it’s necessary (and we will certainly be keeping an eye out, so let us know if you spot anything that needs responding it.)

In 2019, I sent in a couple of extra bits of evidence after the deadline to the previous SEND inquiry, bringing the Committee’s attention to particularly dodgy evidence that some LAs had submitted. The Committee then used that evidence to grill the LAs’ senior management in a formal hearing.

Sometimes, people who submit written evidence to the Education Select Committee are asked to attend an oral evidence hearing

The 2018-19 inquiry was keen to hear from all sorts of voices beyond the usual vol-à-vent-fuelled buffoons who move around the SEND circuit. If you get invited to give oral evidence, let us know—we’d be happy to help you prepare!

Promoted

Some general writing tips from Tania

There is an online form for submissions— you add your name etc on one screen, then you can upload your document on the next.
To help with readability, use your software’s spell/grammar check, or something like Grammarly, which has a free-to-use level. I use Grammarly for SNJ and it catches lots of typos, grammar and style issues, so I highly recommend it. You can type directly into it, add it as an app, a browser add-on, or an add-on for MS Word.
Read your evidence back to yourself, or get your partner, a friend or family member to do so with a fresh eye. This is helpful for a sense check. We often make the mistake of assuming the reader has more knowledge than they actually do when we write about something we care deeply about.
Keep your sentences shorter. It’s important that what you’re saying is clear, so instead of adding sub-clauses to a long sentence, split it into two to make it easier to read. Split your text into shorter paragraphs as it’s easier on the eye.
As Matt says, write out all acronyms in full the first time you include it, eg: local authority (LA).
Leave out details that are not vital to getting your point across. 3,000 words is shorter than you think—as you can see from our article last week, they are asking a LOT of questions (though as Matt says, just answer what you feel strongly about).
If you only have a mobile, you can download the Google Docs app for free and export it as a Word doc

Download the prompts template

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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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