Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to ensure that the proposed Education for All Bill does not adversely impact (a) parents and (b) guardians' legal recourse to appeal the details of a child’s individual Special Educational Needs and Disabilities support.

The department’s consultation ‘SEND reform: putting children and young people first‘ has now closed after a 12-week consultation period including over 200 engagement events, meetings and roundtables. We are carefully reviewing and taking into account all responses submitted to the consultation and continuing to engage widely on our proposals.

Proposals set out included that we will seek to strengthen local authority-commissioned but independent mediation services for decisions about specialist provision, embedding professional standards for mediators, promoting new guidance and sharing best practice. We expect most disputes to be resolved via this route but the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Tribunal will remain as an important legal backstop for the most important local authorities decisions including:

• If parents still have a complaint about a local authority’s decision not to carry out a needs assessment, they would be able to appeal to the Tribunal for a ruling.
• Parents and young people will be able to appeal to the Tribunal against a decision that the child or young person has not met the eligibility criteria for one of the new Specialist Provision Packages, and therefore an education, health and care (EHC) plan.
• Parents and young people will also be able to appeal for a decision from the Tribunal if they believe that the package identified for the child or young person would not provide sufficient or suitable support and that they should have a different package.
• If parents do not agree with the local authority’s decision about the setting, they will be able to appeal to the Tribunal. The Tribunal will consider whether the local authority’s decision is reasonable; if they find against the local authority, they can order the local authority to reconsider. However, the proposal is that the Tribunal would not name the placement for the child.
• Similarly, parents and young people would be able to appeal against a local authority decision that a child no longer needs the support set out in a package and that an EHC plan should cease.