95% of SEND tribunal cases are won by families. LAs know they're going to lose before they send the plan.

Local authorities are legally required to deliver every provision in an EHCP. That's not a guideline or an aspiration, it's an absolute duty under Section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014. There's no "subject to resources" clause. The law says deliver it. That's it.

The problem is it's not funded properly, what has been funded is wasted, and there aren't enough staff to get through the massively increasing workload and backlog. EPs and LAs are struggling.

The numbers: £3.8 billion combined LA DSG deficit as of March 2025. Nine in ten local authorities now running a deficit on their SEND budget. The government's own estimate of the bail-out cost: over £5 billion.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies confirmed in December 2024 that high needs block funding rose from £6.8 billion to £10.4 billion between 2015 and 2024. It still wasn't enough. Accumulated LA deficits hit at least £1.5 billion by 2022–23, with another £700 million gap opening by 2024–25. The IFS put it plainly: "The growth in funding has been slower than the growth in spending, particularly between 2017 and 2021."

Since 2020, local authorities have been allowed to park those deficits in a separate accounting reserve, something called the statutory override. The debts are real. They just don't appear on council balance sheets yet. That override expires in March 2028. Quite a few councils will be technically insolvent when it does.

The bail-out

In February 2026, the government announced the High Needs Stability Grant, a write-off of 90% of each LA's accumulated DSG deficit, on the condition they submit an approved SEND reform plan to the DfE. The government's own guidance puts the cost at over £5 billion. Special Needs Jungle's analysis puts it closer to £6 billion, with the DSG deficit standing at £3.8 billion at March 2025 and still growing.

This probably won't change much for families in the near term. The OBR estimates the funding gap will reach £8.6 billion in 2026–2028. The House of Commons Library notes the LGA is warning councils could become insolvent when the override ends. The debt is being parked again, not resolved. And nobody in government is saying that plainly.

What this means, and I say this after sitting across from enough LA case officers to have some sense of how they operate, is that SEND decisions are being made under severe, compounding financial pressure. That pressure shows up in the vague language in Section F. In the delays. In the automatic refusals at first assessment. It doesn't excuse it. But it does explain it.

There's a dimension to this that rarely gets discussed: a significant chunk of SEND spending isn't reaching children at all. It's being consumed by a system that has become structurally adversarial.

Local authorities spent £153 million defending SEND tribunal cases in 2023-24, with a 1.3% success rate. That's not a typo. LAs won 150 cases out of 11,157 appeals. Over the past decade, the tribunal system has consumed over £600 million of public money, almost entirely defending positions that were legally indefensible from the start. That money did not go to children.

The NAO warned as far back as 2019 that the system was "financially unsustainable," partly because inadequate mainstream provision was pushing children into independent special schools at £54,000 per pupil, more than double the £22,000 cost of a maintained special school place. The number of children in independent or non-maintained placements has nearly doubled since 2015, from 13,000 to 30,000. The expensive outcome is a direct consequence of the cheap decision made earlier in the process.

There's a second structural problem underneath the financial one. Arguably it's worse.

Every EHC needs assessment requires an Educational Psychologist report. You cannot issue an EHCP without one. That means the entire 20-week statutory timeline, a legal requirement, depends on EP availability. There aren't enough EPs.

A DfE-commissioned report cited by the British Psychological Society in 2023 found that 88% of local authorities reported difficulties recruiting EPs, 69% weren't confident they could meet demand, and 96% said the shortages were affecting outcomes for children. A BPS survey in August 2024 found that over half of practising EPs felt unable to adequately support children with their current workload, and 70% felt children in their area didn't have fair access to an EP at all.

Schools Week's analysis put the gap at 360 fewer full-time EPs than in 2010, while Surrey County Council alone had a backlog of around 1,000 assessments waiting for EP input. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman didn't mince words in February 2024: "This crisis has been 10 years in the making. Educational Psychologists cannot be trained overnight and so this situation will not be resolved without significant input on a national scale."

I know what this looks like from the other side. It looks like a child sitting at home for a term while everyone waits for an assessment slot. It looks like a parent asking for a reason and being told "EP capacity." It looks like a legal duty being quietly breached with no enforcement mechanism in sight. Pathway tracks every statutory milestone in the 20-week process and generates formal chase letters when the LA misses one, citing the regulation, the breach, and your LA's own published timeliness data from the DfE SEN2 dataset.

You're dealing with an institution under financial stress, producing legal documents that are often deliberately vague, assessed by professionals in critically short supply, on timelines the system routinely misses, with rights that exist on paper but are only exercised by those with the knowledge and stamina to exercise them.

It is not your fault.

But I want to say something that gets missed in most of these conversations: the law itself is strong. Section 42 is absolute. The Six-W enforceability standard is established case law. The 20-week timeline is statutory. The right to appeal Section F to tribunal is unconditional. The system isn't broken because the legislation is weak. It's broken because most families don't know what the legislation says, and the system has no incentive to tell them.

The question isn't how to change the law. It's how to make sure families walk into this process knowing what the system knows.

I'm a software engineer, 30 years in enterprise platforms, latterly Director of SaaS Engineering at VMware. I know how to build things. What I didn't expect was to end up sitting IPSEA Level 3 SEND law. But honestly, I wanted to. I'm passionate about this. I wanted to understand it properly, I wanted to build something that could actually help other families, and I wanted to try and make a difference.

ChatGPT will write you a letter about your child's EHCP. Pathway builds a legal case. They are not the same thing.

We've done extensive testing with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other general AI systems. The results concern me. They draw from public data and they're often right enough to sound authoritative. The problem is that parents have no way to tell when they're wrong. A generic AI might cite a case that doesn't say what it implies. It might misstate a statutory deadline. It might describe a right that was later qualified by a tribunal decision the model never saw, or simply doesn't exist in the form presented. The response looks confident. It reads like legal guidance. A parent who has been struggling with a question for months, finally getting a clear answer, has no reason to question it.

That's a real problem. Not a theoretical one. We saw it in our own testing, and parents tell me they use ChatGPT to try to understand their rights. Most have no way of knowing when the answer is wrong.

What Pathway is built from:

• IPSEA Level 1, 2 & 3 SEND Law professional training curriculum (certified, 98%)
• Children and Families Act 2014 and SEND Code of Practice 2015
• 1,478 case law and Ombudsman decisions (1984–2026) — Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, Upper Tribunal, and LGSCO
• FOI data from all 152 English local authorities
• Ministry of Justice SEND Tribunal outcome data
• DfE SEN2 statistics and statutory guidance
• Equality Act 2010 and UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Pathway does not guess. Every response it generates is grounded in statute, case law, or published government data, and it cites the source. This is your child's future we're working to improve, and that means we hold ourselves to a higher standard than "probably right."

You can see the full list of what Pathway does at pathway.weaveone.co.uk/capabilities.

Here's what the difference looks like in practice. This is language that appears in real EHCPs and creates no enforceable obligation:

"[Child] will have access to speech and language therapy support as appropriate."

Here's what the same provision looks like rewritten to the L v Clarke [1998] standard, specific enough that a parent can determine whether it's being delivered:

"[Child] will receive 45 minutes of direct, individual speech and language therapy, delivered by an HCPC-registered speech and language therapist, once per week during the school day, in a quiet room at school. This will be provided for a minimum of 38 weeks per year. Progress will be reviewed termly against EHCP outcomes B1 and B3."

Same intervention. One is legally unenforceable. The other is an absolute duty under s.42. Pathway identifies which provisions in your child's EHCP fall into the first category and rewrites them into the second, with the case law cited.

When Pathway flags vague language in Section F, it cites L v Clarke [1998] and B-M v Oxfordshire [2018]. When it finds a gap between Sections B and F, it cites s.42 of the Children and Families Act 2014. When it generates a chase letter for a missed deadline, it uses your LA's own published data from the DfE SEN2 dataset.

This matters because LAs know the law. Their case officers know it. Their legal teams know it. The only way to go into this process on equal footing is to know it too, or have something that does.

The 95%+ tribunal win rate tells you something important: the plans that reach tribunal are almost always legally indefensible. The LA knew this before the hearing. The families who never made it that far, who accepted what they were given, who ran out of energy before running out of legal grounds, those are the families the current system is designed to rely on.

Don't be one of them.