Council bodies demand end to SEND tribunal role

Local authority groups today intensified their campaign for their duties on special educational needs provision to be reduced, and called for an end to the SEND tribunal’s role in deciding disputes with councils.

The calls come in a report commissioned by the County Councils Network (CCN) and the Local Government Association (LGA). The 166 page report, ‘Towards an effective and financially sustainable approach to SEND in England’, was written by management consultancy ISOS Partnership.

The report in particular blamed the rising cost of meeting SEND responsibilities on the rise in Education Health and Care Plans for children and young people who have autism.

ISOS said: ‘LA and health leaders said that they were seeing increases in young people with autism, SEMH and SLCN, often in combination and with wider needs. They argued that it was these trends, rather than increases in children with profound and potentially life-limiting conditions now surviving birth and early childhood, that was characterising the increased volume of the SEND system.’

Among eight solutions, ISOS argues: ‘In a future SEND system, LAs and local health services are best placed to assess which children and young people need support beyond what is available in mainstream, using their budgets to provide support that meets the needs of their local population.’

And the involvement of the tribunal in determining disputes should end. Instead, there is a demand for ‘a new, independent, non-judicial mechanisms for dealing with disagreements about decision-making’.

Charity the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice (IPSEA), which supports families with advice and information as they negotiate the SEND system for an assessment, condemned the proposals.

Policy manager Catriona Moore said: ‘Children’s rights and entitlements are apparently not compatible with the new way they’d like to do things… there are assertions about children and young people receiving unnecessary levels of specialist support that are simply not backed up by evidence.’

She added: ‘The inconvenient situation where the SEND Tribunal applies the law by overturning unlawful local decision-making and making sure individual children and young people receive the provision they need would, according to this blueprint, be addressed by simply removing the Tribunal’s role in SEND appeals.’

In a joint foreword to the ISOS report, cllr Tim Oliver, Conservative leader of Surrey County Council and CCN chair, and cllr Louise Gittins, Labour leader of Cheshire West and chair of the LGA, said: ‘Over the past decade the number of EHCPs have more than doubled and the supply of specialist placements is vastly outstripped by the number of families whose child is assessed as needing one… It is not hyperbole to say that it is becoming increasingly clear that SEND represents an existential threat to the financial sustainability of local government.’

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