Special educational needs and disability tribunals in England 1994-2019

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an overview of the rate of appeal to the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Tribunal in England by analysis of official data published by the Ministry of Justice. The article will also consider the effects of socio-economic deprivation on appeals and hearings, the fiscal constraints placed on Local Authorities and the 2018 change to the calculation of the rate of appeal. The 2014 Children and Families Act consigns a greater emphasis on the avoidance of disagreements, nevertheless appeals to the Tribunal have more than doubled since 2015. Analyses of appeal and hearing rates are conducted for all English Local Authorities (LAs) and regions using the government’s Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index to identify levels of deprivation. The research confirms significant variations across LAs and regions and concludes that the appeal and hearing rates in areas with lower socio-economic status (SES) are significantly smaller than in the least deprived areas. There still continues to be considerable challenges to improving parental confidence for the SEND non-statutory offer (Lamb, 2009, 2019). The question remains though how achievable is this in the exceptionally uncertain funding environment, post Covid-19?

KEYWORDS:

• Special educational needs and disability- england
• send tribunal appeals
• send tribunal hearings
• IDACI – socio-economic deprivation
• disagreement resolution
• mediation

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in:

GOV.UK Collection - Tribunal Statistics at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics The LA hearings data 2014-2019 (see appendix) was requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan J. Marsh

Alan J. Marsh is an independent researcher and a former chartered educational psychologist, with over 25 years employment in English Local Authorities. He has taught in primary, secondary and special schools and completed his PhD in Formula Funding and Special Educational Needs (Marsh 2018). He was seconded to the Department for Education in London to write the guidance document for the National Performance Framework for SEN (DfES 2003b; DfE 2020a), an early prototype to the Local Area Interactive Tool.