Why almost every parent winning their appeal is NOT something to celebrate.

In the 2024-25 academic year, 29,446 families in England appealed to the SEND Tribunal about decisions made on their disabled children's education. These parents won their case 99.2 per cent of the time.

A figure of that kind deserves a moment's reflection. In any contest between citizen and state some margin of official error is to be expected, and a healthy institution learns from its defeats. But when a public body is found to be wrong in more than ninety-nine cases in every hundred, the tribunal has ceased to be a forum where genuine disagreements are settled. It has become a record of decisions that should never have been made.

Justify has supported parents at these hearings. By the time a family reaches a tribunal they have usually spent months or years being told no.

No, your child does not need an assessment.

No, the support in the plan is not really necessary.

No, there is nothing more we can do.

They arrive carrying lever-arch files they have assembled at their kitchen tables at midnight, after work, after caring, and in almost every case the law turns out to have been on their side from the beginning.

None of this is new. A decade ago there were 4,277 appeals a year, and even then parents won 93.9 per cent of them. An institution capable of learning would have treated those defeats as instruction, and changed the way it made decisions. Instead the appeals have grown almost sevenfold, the tribunal's open caseload has reached 15,000, the highest on record, and families wait ever longer for hearings whose outcome is scarcely in doubt. A defeat at tribunal costs a council very little. The waiting costs a family a year of a childhood. Where the consequences of being wrong fall so unevenly, there is no reason to expect the wrong decisions to stop.

Justify has seen this from the inside. In one case we supported, a local authority conceded in the High Court that it had decided wrongly in 86 per cent of its assessments of children with special educational needs in a single year. It is worth pausing over what a concession like that means. A body that errs so consistently has, in effect, adopted error as its method; somewhere along the way it stopped asking the question the law required of it and began asking what it could afford. The concession led to an independent review and seventeen formal recommendations. And it came about only because one family declined to accept, as thousands do each year, the official letter explaining that nothing could be done.

The most important people in this story appear nowhere in these figures. A win rate, however striking, records only the families who found their way to the tribunal. Behind the 29,446 who appealed stand a far greater number who chose to accept the decision. There are thousands of parents worn down by years of asking, parents working and caring in shifts that leave them exhausted. They are the parents who took the official letter at its word, as most of us are inclined to take official letters. Their absence is what makes the whole arrangement affordable. A refusal costs a council nothing until somebody challenges it, and the sums have been done on the reliable assumption that most people never will.

You may have seen that the government is reforming the system. A recent White Paper promises new kinds of support plans and says education, health and care plans will eventually be reserved for children with the most complex needs. Whatever those reforms turn out to mean, they change nothing before September 2030 at the earliest. A child's rights today are exactly what they were last year. If anyone suggests that support is being wound down, or that there is no point asking because the rules are changing, that is wrong, and parents are entitled to insist on what the law says now.

What follows from this is practical. A family that asks for an assessment in writing, keeps a copy of every letter, and watches the deadlines, which can be as short as two months, has already done most of what the families in that 99.2 per cent did. None of it requires a lawyer at the outset, and none of it needs to be faced alone. Justify was founded to stand beside families who cannot afford representation, and we have never charged anyone for our help.

The families in that 99.2 per cent were not lucky, and most were not wealthy. They found out what the law already said about their children, in time to use it. That knowledge should not be the privilege of the few who stumble into it. It belongs to every family, including yours.

If a school or local authority has made a decision about your child that you believe is wrong, we may be able to help. Our support is always free, and you do not need a lawyer to begin. Get in touch via our chat box found in the bottom corner of this page.

Justify is a small charity, and this work is funded entirely by donations. If you would like to help another family reach that hearing room, you can give here.