Inside Surrey’s SEND Crisis: Case officers reveal the inner workings of a broken system

by Rachel Filmer, Matt Keer and Tania Tirraoro

Contents

Toggle

Today, we’re looking at a surprisingly frank report from Surrey about their SEND that’s relevant wherever you live, but first, if you saw the budget yesterday, you’ll be aware that Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced an additional £1 billion for SEND, a 6% increase, as well as £300 million for further education and an uplift of 2.3% to core education budgets. Considering £2.6 billion in 2021 hasn’t made that much difference, it’s unclear what this injection will achieve, but the SEND announcement is below, along with a comment from Matt…

”The ‘£1 billion for SEND’ announced in yesterday’s budget will be added to the main education funding pot that central government doles out each year to local government and academies. The funding won’t arrive until April 2025, and it covers one year only. Longer-term funding will be hammered out in the spring.
That’s not nothing. But there are three important things to bear in mind. Firstly, there’ll be no extra funding until next spring. Secondly, as is the norm with this type of increase, the extra funding will be given to LAs, and they’ll decide how to use it.
And thirdly, going by what the Treasury is saying, they don’t expect that much of this £1 billion to actually reach schools – most of it will be used to plug existing local authority deficits. So while the announcement is welcome, the chances are that the children you’re raising or educating won’t see a direct benefit from the £1 billion.”

Matt Keer, SNJ’s SEND Finance and statistics expert

As MPs debate the budget, SEND provision in Surrey’s neighbour, Hampshire (home of two of our directors) will be the focus of a debate in parliament today on Halloween, appropriately enough. We’ll be watching…

Frank testimony highlighting deep problems in Surrey

Now to the Surrey report…and even if you’re not in Surrey, this makes for very interesting reading as it is probably the experience of many other areas…. We’ve interspersed graphics of many of the comments throughout the piece, and you can download all the ones we’ve selected and laid out in infographics here

While every LA is crying out for more funding, Surrey is one area that should have got its house in order by now. Surrey was a pathfinder for the 2014 reforms and so had a head start on the changes, but has since failed, failed and almost failed, every Ofsted/CQC inspection. It even had to junk the first iteration of its Local Offer website because it was abysmal, costing even more.

Over the years, there have been many, many Surrey reviews, both external and internal, with the same grim headlines and the same homeopathic levels of impact. They’ve included large-scale reorganisations and restructuring, forcing staff to reapply for their own jobs, while SEND provision only got worse. A few weeks ago, another review took place, this time by Surrey councillors, with its select committee publishing a vast 120-page report investigating the state of the local authority’s SEND services.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that, as in many LAs, the report highlighted deep problems. But there are a couple of things that make this report slightly different, and worth looking at closely because this report focuses on relationships with parents and carers. And unlike many council reports, the terms of reference appear carefully designed to shine a broad light on these relationships.

The report contains a lot of direct testimony from people at the heart of these relationships. The testimony from parent carers is often harrowing, but it also includes testimony from some of Surrey’s SEND case officers, and some of the councillors who have worked to resolve issues between families and council SEND managers.

Experiences backed up by Surrey complaints and Tribunal findings

In many areas across the country, the relationship between parent carers and local authorities has long deteriorated past the point of dysfunction. From councillors, to the former Secretary of State for Education, parental blame is pervasive, with councils resenting informed parents, and parents seeing LAs as deliberately failing children to save money.

Surrey is part of the Department for Education’s Safety Valve financial intervention scheme for LAs in the worst financial situation. Each year, the LA also racks up some of the country’s largest numbers of upheld complaints to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. When examined at SEND Tribunal hearings, Surrey LA’s decisions are upheld in just 2% of cases (similar to the national figure of 1.7%)

If you’d like to read the Surrey parent carer testimony, you can find it here. We’d recommend you do. But this article will focus on what the SEND case officers had to say. Why? Because it’s rare to hear the voices of front-line council staff in discussions about the SEND system. You’ll find a few examples in the written evidence submitted to the 2018-19 House of Commons Education Select Committee SEND inquiry, but not many.

The perspective of front-line council SEND case officers, their understanding of the law, their freedom and willingness to solve problems, the pressure they experience on the job – these things affect the life chances of the children you’re raising or teaching. Even if you don’t agree with their viewpoints, it’s worth getting a better sense of these officers’ views, their ability, their freedom to act, and their willingness to do what they do.

The issues won’t come as much of a surprise to any of us.

• Caseloads are unmanageable.
• Deadlines are unrealistic.
• Training is insufficient.
• The recovery plan involves whitewashing the issues and using agency workers to push through poor EHCPs as quickly as possible.
• Workload is prioritised to make the service look better on paper.
• Their expensive case management system is a useless hindrance.

Essentially they are human shields for a shifting management team making unlawful decisions, in the name of cost avoidance and in the face of an unworkable Safety Valve agreement. All the same, it’s worth remembering a couple of things before proceeding. Only a few case officers were interviewed, their testimony is anonymous, and a Surrey SEND manager was also present. What’s here is what these parties were willing to put into the public domain.

The transcripts reveal an overworked staff, with case officers handling up to 200 cases each and receiving 50-60 emails a day. Parents often find themselves chasing updates due to a lack of communication, which increases the workload and in a never-ending vicious circle:

“Management suggest putting a communication plan in place, we’ll update you every three weeks”. Given the legal timeframe of 20 weeks, this feels absurd. “But it’s just one more task to add to the endless list of tasks you’ve got. Sometimes your update is there’s no update, which is awful”

Following their investigation, councillors recommended some major changes to Surrey’s SEND service staffing. Recommendations included:

• compulsory, IPSEA-led training in SEND law;
• neurodiversity training;
• a 50% increase in permanent, customer-facing case officers, and
• better preparation of case officers to deal with the real-life experiences of parent carers. You can read the full testimony here.

Staffing issues

Staffing levels are consistently cited as a significant issue, exacerbated by poor retention rates. One officer says,

“Retention of employees in this Surrey department is not very good; we changed managers three or four times in less than a year.”

While another officer says of her sub-area (quadrant), before the recruitment manager steps in to minimise,

“We’ve never had both the area manager and service manager positions filled in the time I’ve been there”

For parents, these officers are the face of the service and its many failings, absorbing anger over management decisions:

“We are the ones that take the brunt of it.”

There’s perhaps a misconception that parents believe they have decision-making power. I suspect the real issue is parents’ lack of access to those who do. The failure of LAs to meet the legal timescales for the EHCP process has been a point of national focus over the last year, and the officers take issue with “unrealistic” deadlines set out by the law.

“We know when our deadlines are, we want to do it, we just can’t”, says one.

“Parents say, ‘You’re meant to get back to me within four weeks, where’s my draft?’ and I can’t say, ‘In a pile with 50 others’”.

These case officers recount appalling expectations from their employer in an attempt to meet deadlines, with nothing more than hollow thanks:

“We were up until 4am working to meet the [key stage] deadline. Two weeks later we had a whole team meeting and the Assistant Director said well done and I said, At what cost?”. We all had to take time off after that.”

This is underlined by recent research into SEND officer experience that found a lack of clarity about their role, leading to inconsistencies in how the job is done “both between and within local authorities and others’ expectations of the role”. The research also found while SEND officers get ‘on the job’ training it is inconsistent between LAs with a lack of training on communication, co-production and person-centred planning.

Placement shortage affects morale

Officers are painfully aware that rushing to meet deadlines means the quality of plans issued is unacceptable: “it doesn’t feel well done when you’re sending out a lot of EHCPs that have just got the school type named and no actual place.”

Many LAs have put systems in place to improve their timeliness, and these are often questionable. We know that there is manipulation to improve appearances, but it’s still shocking to hear it casually confirmed:

“We were trying to make the numbers look better. We were behind on the whole load but the newer ones were being seen before the old ones to make the numbers better.”

When asked about the end-to-end review, one says,

“I think it’s being fluffed, window-dressed to look better than it is. We’ve got emails explaining the finding so far and I think a picture is being presented with things omitted.”.

We couldn’t agree more with that.

Rush to meet deadlines with too few staff affects quality of EHCPs

We’ve known for a long time that this blinkered focus on statistics is adversely affecting the quality of plans and obscuring the real issues. It was also one of the issues mentioned by former SEND Minister, Ed Timpson in our recent podcast, about how the rush to meet deadlines for changing from statements to EHCPs affected the quality of new plans, but hearing the reality of it from those on the inside is disturbing.

Surrey has implemented a recovery team made up of agency workers to push plans through, and the problems with this approach are mounting. One officer noted that agency staff are pushed to complete tasks quickly with no focus on quality, and “the end result are not good plans.” Officers have no communication from the recovery team and clearly don’t want them involved, for good reason: “The Recovery Team was meant to come in and help with our workload […] But I don’t want the Recovery Team to touch my cases.”

Unsurprisingly, there’s clear resentment over the way tasks are assigned and the relative pay: “It’s quite depressing for us as well when you know they’re getting paid twice as much as us, and yet they’re doing a basic task like putting an EHCP into the system.” One case officer mentions the appalling lack of communication, and finding out “by accident” that the recovery team have their own decision-making panel. It seems the officers are still assigned these cases and someone else who’s paid more is progressing them poorly. Case officers then have to deal with parents, who rightly, are angry.

“I’ve had recovery plans issued where the evidence wasn’t included – it was submitted but not included – so the child then goes to mainstream when they need special.”

These teams may be increasing compliance with deadlines, but where are the metrics that show the poor quality and unlawful content of these plans? What will the repercussions of this be for children, as well as for Surrey’s budget? As one officer puts it, “The tribunal team are going to have a very busy couple of years.”

“Demanding” parents who “know their rights”

Speaking of SEND tribunals, it’s depressingly predictable to hear the usual LA narrative of “pushy parents” repeated by those with the most knowledge of what parents endure.

“Parents that are in Surrey tend to be a bit more demanding, they know their rights”.

Asking for the law to be followed or seeking other sources of support is seen as unreasonable:

“In our quadrant parents believe the one that shouts the loudest will get what they want. They tend to copy MPs and councillors into emails.”

(Note: SNJ also gets copied in to emails like this. When we asked one parent why, we were told that with our email on the trail, they thought it would get more action, but this is perhaps not a great idea for reasons of your child’s privacy.)

This attitude clearly comes from the top down. The only reason you’d want parents to be uninformed about the law is because you don’t plan to follow it. These staff aren’t decision-makers, so why are they so unhappy with informed parents advocating for their children? Worse still, the parents who do challenge are blamed for other children being failed. Parents are viewed in two groups: difficult parents who know the law, and parents whose children are failed:

“Some don’t understand their rights, they might not be well-educated, they’re not shouting the loudest at all, they’re at a disadvantage.” Another officer states “It’s our job to advocate for those children” which is heartening.

There’s discussion of parents who just accept what the LA is telling them when they should be appealing: “All I want to say is please go to tribunal, but you can’t say that”. Others swiftly state they do advise parents to appeal. None acknowledge that appealing should be a rare last resort, not a necessity. The fact that an inability to appeal puts children at a disadvantage is clear evidence of the system regularly and intentionally ignoring the law unless challenged.

Cognitive dissonance

There’s some cognitive dissonance here too. One officer talks about the variable quality of professional reports from LA educational psychologists and others. Another says that parents paying for private reports is “another level of discrimination” against families who can’t afford this. There’s no acknowledgement of the link between these two issues, or that every child should have sufficient reports provided as part of the process. The discrimination is borne of the inadequate system, not desperate parents finding any way to ensure their child can access education.

SEND officers and the law

One SEND officer admitted they hadn’t read the SEND Code of Practice in full, then says “we know what we need to know for the job”. They reassert that they are not decision-makers so it doesn’t matter, but they also state they’re responsible for putting EHCPs together.

One claims “Different people interpret the CoP differently” and that, when discussing cases with a solicitor “I have no problem telling them actually you’re wrong”. This reveals the fundamental issue with the lack of mandatory legal training for these roles, something the task group recommends is addressed with IPSEA training. In the parents’ focus group meanwhile, one of the issues raised is that it’s case workers, not parents, who don’t understand the law—and that seems a reasonable inference.

Discussion of the often-mysterious and inscrutable panel process is particularly fascinating, with one case officer describing the deliberations of panels as “good, really in-depth” despite acknowledging that they don’t attend them. Another explains they have a maximum of 35 cases per panel meeting of 4-5 hours. At best, this equates to 7 cases per hour, or 8.5 minutes per child, assuming no one needs a break. This includes decisions on whether to issue plans or not—is it possible to carefully deliberate such a life-changing decision in a few minutes? Do parents know these decisions are made so swiftly? How much time have they spent on pre-reading before the panel? In most cases, there are no records of the discussions in panel meetings, only the outcomes. This needs to change urgently.

Despite their open discussion of the infuriating issues faced by both parents and staff, officers look for other sources of blame. Perhaps it’s schools themselves, says one case officer: “It feels like parents’ resentment is maybe coming from the teachers. It might be an easy response for the SENCo to put the blame on the LA.” Next up, “Social media is a big problem” because of course it is. You can’t have parents knowing their rights and “demanding” they are met.

They do raise a legitimate concern about social media. Finding out you’ve been named and shamed in a Facebook group when you’ve been working with one hand tied behind your back is not acceptable. We’d like to gently remind everyone that personal abuse, no matter how angry or justified you feel, is no more acceptable than LA poor performance or toxic practice. As parents, we need to channel our frustration in the right direction. We rely on these groups in a system where support and legitimate advice is a rare resource. But case workers are also human, and some have their own children with SEND who have previously been group members themselves, presumably wanting to do the job to improve things.

Battling IT, and struggling with the impact of failure

Like many public sector workers, officers are picking up the slack for a system where non-statutory support has all but vanished, despite their impossible workload:

“I had a call that went on for an hour with a parent who had lots of difficulties herself, that was quite a harrowing call, I called my manager and had a debrief. It wasn’t angry or aggressive, it was just really sad. I’m not a social worker. A lot of the call was listening and just being there which is fine, I want to be there for families, but I didn’t get any work done in that hour.”

Their issues with the IT system they use are probably familiar to anyone who works in public services. It doesn’t work, they’re forced to use it, the council didn’t pay for the full package and it doesn’t work properly. Case officers can’t even run a spell check on a draft EHCP, so staff aren’t updating it, and that’s a problem when you have such high staff turnover and absence. When staff leave, their “work trays” get closed and new staff can’t access what they’ve done. Yet another example of public funds being paid out to external companies who don’t understand the realities of the work, for a system that makes things worse

No mention of the impact of Safety Valve

One thing strangely absent is discussion of the funding crisis. If Surrey are putting pressure on case officers to reduce provision and cease plans to ensure their Safety Valve targets are met, they’re not saying so. Instead, they focus on the lack of suitable placements:

“I have so many children in my caseload, families we’ve agreed a specialist placement and we have to say, Have you tried AP (Alternative Provision), a nurture farm, swimming lessons? Because we can’t send them to mainstream, it’s not suitable for them, and we don’t have anywhere else for them to go.”

This is particularly important in view of the recent breakdown of plans to set up a new specialist school, with so many disabled children in Surrey having to travel to neighbouring LAs to access education at all.

Difficult working conditions—but harder for families

It’s impossible to read this transcript and not empathise with their awful working conditions. One case officer who has personal experience of the system obviously feels the pressure of this heavily, saying “I felt I was in a position where I was failing my families”. That must be incredibly hard, and I can’t imagine many of us could cope in this role for long. Pastoral support and debriefs aren’t much use – it’s no wonder staff turnover is so high. Yet, despite the awful issues they’ve identified, one officer says “Surrey has been the best employer I’ve worked with”. That’s incredibly sad, if true.

At the end of the transcript, it says “next steps: Witness session with SEND leadership and management”. That’s what we really need here. These case officers have been very open about what they see as the issues, which opens them up to criticism, but they are just doing as instructed.

While unusual in its scope and the depths of its recommendations, the report ignores the elephant in the room: without an increase in specialist school places, without sufficient accessible education for disabled children and with a Safety Valve deal affecting decision making, you cannot improve parents’ experience of the system.

No matter how empathetic or well-trained the staff, what we need is for our children’s legal rights to be met as a matter of course. It’s on the government to find a way to ensure the law is followed—without diluting rights—and we are yet to see much detail on how this will be achieved.

[Should any of the Surrey documents have broken links at some point in the future, we’ve uploaded them, along with our graphics here]

Also read:

• Delivering better value in SEND? Much of a new review is based on deep and fatal flaws that may uproot the SEND system
• “Lack of stigma” blamed for rising SEND? We will NEVER be ashamed of our disabled children
• NAO: The Government has no clear SEND plan and should consider “whole-system reform” to incentivise mainstream inclusion
• The Lords publishes a “blueprint” to help young disabled people “thrive in work” saying too many are “written off”
• A record rise in SEND appeals, and challenges for teachers accessing school support. Things are not getting better…
• Law Commission Review: Fixing a ‘bafflingly complex’ disabled children’s social care system
• “The curriculum belongs to the nation” Let them know that includes children with special educational needs
• Children with SEND deserve better than being made pawns in the VAT wars
• Should we ‘mind the gap’ of disabled pupils’ attainment? Or is it really an indictment of how success is measured?
• The Ofsted changes are bad news for SEND accountability
• The SEND “Emergency” debate: scrap safety valve, write-off high needs debt and stop piling trauma on to families
• An epidemic of SEND school transport failings leaves disabled children at risk and missing school
• Four practical tips for enforcing the ‘absolute duty’ to secure special educational provision in EHCPs

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

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

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

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

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

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

• About
• Latest Posts

Follow SNJ

Special Needs Jungle

Special Needs Jungle at Special Needs Jungle

Special Needs Jungle was founded in 2008 as a personal SEN blog by Tania Tirraoro. It is now a multi-author, award-winning site covering special needs, disability, mental health and rare conditions in children & young people birth-25 years.

Follow SNJ

Latest posts by Special Needs Jungle (see all)

• What makes an autism assessment report genuinely useful to a school? - October 14, 2026
• Big ideas belong to everyone: Education, rights and lifelong learning for people with learning disabilities - October 12, 2026
• As The Guardian prints our joint campaign’s open letter, it’s clear people with lived experience don’t want to lose SEND rights - October 9, 2026