Children with SEND: Assessments and Support

Chris Coghlan Excerpts

Monday 15th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. In Dorking the other day, a mum called Jenny came to see me about her daughters, Isabelle and Sienna. They are severely learning disabled, epileptic, blind, non-verbal and tube fed. Isabelle and Sienna have difficult lives, but they thrive when they are together. Jenny had to take Surrey county council to tribunal four times to fight for their rights—not only to get their needs met, but simply to get them together in the same school. Although she ultimately won her fight, that cost Jenny her life savings and her marriage. I said to her that if she were my mum, I would be incredibly grateful. I hope she is proud of what she is doing, because she should be.

It is not only profoundly disabled children who are mistreated by local authorities. I have today published almost 500 family testimonies of unlawful, harmful and unethical behaviour on SEND by 92 local authorities across the entire country. I will continue to collect these testimonies and I will be taking this further. These local authorities are led by every major political party, including my own, so this is not a party political issue. Rather, it suggests that there is something systemically wrong with local authority governance in this country—a failure of accountability to locally elected councillors. My own local authority, Surrey, hid for over 14 months the fact that it had the highest level of complaints on SEND in the country.

We know that local authorities are financially overwhelmed on SEND, but too often their response to the suffering of children such as Isabelle and Sienna is to be desensitised and to breed a culture of denial and dishonesty—a brutalised system. If we reduce SEND rights and throw children away to local authorities we cannot trust, we throw away their lives. The answer is early intervention.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, especially during such a powerful speech. He raises the issue of early intervention. I have seen this in my own constituency, where if people can catch special educational needs early enough, they can get the right packages of support in place. Does my hon. Friend recognise, as I do, that early intervention is critical to the future of our children and the next generation?

[Chris Coghlan]

I entirely agree, because by the age of three a child has 1,000 trillion brain connections, but that declines to 500 trillion by adolescence. That is why the earlier the intervention, the more effective the outcome and the lower the total cost. That is even before we consider the cost of a parent who has to leave work to look after a child unable to cope at school, or an adult who ends up in social services instead of a job.

The Government must resist the siren calls of local authorities to reduce SEND rights. There are too many people in despair right now, but if the Government focus on early intervention for our children, they can set out a path for hope.

[Several hon. Members rose—]