Councils across England are paying families thousands of pounds after failing to provide SEND support set out in education, health and care plans (EHCPs).
But experts say the costs can be less than providing the special educational needs provision children are entitled to – meaning services “rarely improve”.
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) investigates complaints from parents about councils’ administrative actions, and can request that councils pay “financial remedy”.
Schools Week examined complaints made over the past four months, and found 21 cases in which councils paid out at least £2,000.
In one case, Hertfordshire County Council paid the mother of a boy who had been excluded from school £8,500.
The ombudsman found it at fault for not providing an appropriate education or the specialist provision stipulated in his EHCP for more than a year.
Surrey County Council was found to have caused “significant injustice” to a teenager after “repeated failures” left her for two years without any of the educational provision or therapeutic activities detailed in her EHCP.
The council paid her father £14,400 for her loss of education, plus £500 in recognition of the family’s “distress, uncertainty, and time and trouble”.
Most complaints upheld
But payouts are “almost always far less than the cost of delivering provision in the first place,” said Matt Keer of Special Needs Jungle.
As a result, “even though the overwhelming majority of complaints are upheld, local SEND practice rarely improves”.
Ombudsman guidance states councils should pay up to £2,400 per term when their fault has resulted in a loss of education provision. Parents can also get £100 for each month an EHCP is delayed over the statutory 20 weeks.
But provision mandated by an EHCP costs on average £19,100 a year for a mainstream secondary placement and £23,900 in a state special school, according to the National Audit Office. Private places average £61,500.
A spokesperson for Hertfordshire council said it took “all decisions by the LGSCO very seriously”.
The council noted an increase of more than 200 per cent in EHCPs since 2015. More than half of its EHC needs assessments were now completed on time, above the national average.
Surrey said it had invested £15 million into a multi-year plan that included recruiting more staff and building new specialist school places.
It said its EHCP timeline levels were well above the national average and it had caught up on its backlog of EHC needs assessments.
Last March, Schools Week revealed SEND complaints to the ombudsman had nearly tripled since 2019.
Ninety-two per cent of the SEND complaints investigated in 2023-24 were upheld. The ombudsman’s office told Schools Week it expected to uphold a similar proportion this year.
“A situation where we are upholding nearly 100 per cent of complaints cannot be one that is working for children and their families,” it recently told the parliamentary education committee’s ongoing SEND inquiry.
Not a deterrent
Gillian Doherty, also of Special Needs Jungle, said it was difficult to know whether councils’ actions were deliberate.
“They are in a desperate financial situation, so they’re saving money in whatever short-term way they can – regardless of the consequences.”
She added the level of the penalties were “not of a deterrent nature…That gets completely exploited.”
Brendan Anderson, an independent SEND and EHCP consultant, said parents had told him the £100 “does not really compensate for the missed provision”.
“If it was £1,000 a month, maybe things would change.”
The ombudsman said the payments were “not intended to act as compensation or a fine”.
Instead, payments were “a modest symbolic amount” to recognise “the fault and injustice experienced by the young person and family involved”.
The ombudsman also makes recommendations on how to improve councils’ service.
“The starting point for the remedies we recommend…is to try and put the person back in the position they should have been in if the issues had not occurred.”
’In circumstances where a child or young person has been out of school or without provision for an extended period, that is not generally possible”.
Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at the ASCL leaders’ union, said that behind each story was a child and their family “wrestling with complex issues and desperately in need of expert help”.
“We urgently need to rescue the special educational needs system to ensure that schools and local authorities have the capacity they need to offer timely support to all children in their care.”
