The Family Who Refused the Last Word

In December 2023 the High Court found that Hertfordshire County Council had acted unlawfully in failing to complete a child’s education, health and care assessment within the period that Parliament had laid down for it. The case is recorded as R (W) v Hertfordshire County Council [2023] EWHC

3138 (Admin), and Justify supported the family whose challenge brought it there. I want to set out why a dispute that began with one council and one child came to matter far beyond either, because it reveals something about the way these systems yield, slowly and reluctantly, to people who are willing to hold them to their word.

Over 2021 and 2022, Hertfordshire accepted that it had reached an erroneous decision in eighty-six per cent of the relevant special educational needs assessments it carried out. An authority entrusted with the welfare of its most vulnerable children was, on its own admission, getting the answer wrong far more often than it got it right, while the families on the receiving end were largely expected to treat those decisions as settled and final.

Most of them did. That acquiescence, drawn from people who had every right to refuse it, is the deeper failure here, and the one least likely ever to reach a courtroom. The law furnished every one of those parents with grounds to object, yet grounds are worth little to someone who does not know that they hold them, cannot afford a solicitor to press them, and has been told, in the measured and seemingly unanswerable language of administration, that the matter is now closed.

The court went considerably further than recording the breach. It affirmed that the duty to complete an assessment within twenty weeks binds an authority absolutely, that an appeal to best endeavours is no answer to it, and that time begins to run from the day a parent makes the request, whatever later date the authority might prefer to acknowledge. The case then settled on terms of real consequence. Hertfordshire agreed to commission an independent review of the way it reaches these decisions. That review, published in July 2024, ran to ninety-six pages and made seventeen formal recommendations; the council set out a plan to implement them, reported its progress to its own scrutiny committee, and undertook to examine its performance data each month. A single family’s refusal to treat an unlawful decision as the last word had become a monitored programme of reform touching every child the authority assesses.

The significance of this reaches further still. A barrister who examined the case afterwards described it as a demonstration of what strategic, policy-based judicial review can accomplish, and as work that helps to secure good governance under the rule of law. It has since been cited in other proceedings; when Cambridgeshire County Council was challenged over a similar delay in 2026, the Hertfordshire judgment formed part of the ground on which the argument stood. This is what I mean when I say that a single case can prove something. Its value outlasts the dispute it settles, enduring as an instrument that other families, and the lawyers who act for them, can take up in their turn.

Meanwhile the underlying need continues to grow. Across England, authorities are declining to assess a rising proportion of the children brought to them. A few years ago they refused around a fifth of requests; by 2023 the figure had climbed towards a third; and in 2024 little more than two thirds of requests were agreed at all. A family making the request is markedly more likely to be turned away than a school or a clinician making the same one, and behind every refusal stands a parent weighing whether they possess the knowledge, the means and the endurance to contest it.

That weighing is where Justify does its work. We help families to understand what has actually happened to them and whether the decision can properly be challenged; we stand beside them in rooms that are arranged to make them feel small and alone; and where the law can be made to compel an account, we use it, as we used it in Hertfordshire. We are a small charity, sustained by volunteers, and we carry this work without the legal aid or the professional fees that place it beyond the reach of the families who most need it.

The Hertfordshire case cost time, persistence and money, and in the end it changed the way an entire authority treats thousands of children. Every family who comes to us has first been told that the decision is final; what we offer is the means to discover whether that is true. A gift of any size helps us stand beside the next family, and the next child, before an unlawful decision is allowed to become the last word.

To support Justify’s work, donate here. Registered charity 1188873.

If your family is facing an unlawful or unfair decision and you need advice, contact us.