Is this appropriate conduct for solicitors?

[AugustaFinkNottle]

A solicitors' firm which acts for councils in special educational needs tribunals has tweeted the following:

"Great ABA Trib win this week ... interesting to see how parents continue to persist with it. Funny thing is parents think they won ;)"

I can't link to it due to having been blocked but it's been retweeted, e.g here.

The original tweet resulted in numerous complaints and a quick change to the tweet.

The case they're triumphalising about will have involved a disabled child. Lovely.

user I don't know why I keep bothering to reply but you are wrong again.
Funds available to shareholders (as I clearly explained earlier) is AFTER corporation tax and dividends are taken out.

And I am not 'scurrying' to dissolve my company as it's still beneficial tax wise.

Sounds ghoulish anewday is it not slightly traumatising to write and research? Not exactly light relief from all the fighting for correct provision for your child is it?

Seems an almost pathological lack of empathy and self-preservation instincts on Mr Small's part.

Great that these attitudes have been scrutinised and condemned. Great that he won't be in a position to continue acting in this way.

user what do you want to be fair? Do you want all the posters here and on other sites to back off Mark Small because you feel he's had enough? Is that what you consider to be fair?

If that's the case then by your logic you will have copious posts about the fairness shown to the many SEN families on here. Your righteous indignation will be documented here. Except that it's not. I'm sure it never will be.

I think it's quite possible that you are defending him because you're a solicitor who possibly shares the same views, or you defend all solicitors no matter how they behave, or you're being goady, or you're bored...or maybe a combination of all of this.

It can be very expensive (and it is our money, we tax payers who are the ultimate people paying hand over fist for all this on all sides let us remember) to change solicitors. You need a new firm to read into all the files, you are double paying for a while, you will probably be paying higher rates because the new firm will know you have felt left high and dry because of the publice outcry meaning you feel you have no choice but to terminate a contract with Small.

None of this is necessary. Many LAs use internal tribunal officers to deal with tribunal appeals and in any event, if they have taken decisions properly and with full regard to the evidence then they really shouldn't need lawyers to defend them. SENDIST is designed to be user-friendly and many parents represent themselves without lawyers. Additionally, most LAs have their own legal departments. If they really need a lawyer, and if their own lawyers don't have the right experience, they can very easily and relatively cheaply instruct expert barristers in the relevant field to take over ongoing cases. Given that there are a number of barristers around there is enough of a competition element to keep fees down to manageable levels, very probably cheaper than BS.

user, I'm fairly astonished that, as a lawyer, you aren't able to check Data Protection Act provisions for yourself. Of course you can't just contact a school and demand every scrap of information they have about a child and his family just because there is an appeal to the tribunal about that child. The most you can do is ask for evidence that is specifically relevant to the issues in the appeal, but you can't leave it to the school to sort it out for you because they aren't generally DPA experts.

Posted too soon on that DPA point. User, you are missing what I said: what BS were doing were asking schools to send the entire file they held on the child, telling them in their capacity as lawyers that it was authorised under the DPA. They were not asking them to weed out stuff about the family, nor were they asking them to weed out anything else that was irrelevant to the appeal. When a school is told by lawyers acting for the LA that sending the entire file is authorised under the DPA they tend to believe it.

I am, frankly, gobsmacked that you can seriously write "It is not illegal to make a full data protection subject access request surely? It is that kind of comment which is so unfair on this man whose life has been destroyed by the witch hunt". How can you possibly think that you can just demand another person's data and receive it? To go on to claim that this rendered the whole thing massively unfair is even more bizarre. Suffice it to say, when these facts were drawn to the attention of the schools who took their own legal advice, those advisers did not agree with your interpretation of the law, nor did the tribunal.

It is really irresponsible to start slinging around allegations of libel when you simply aren't reading properly what you are responding to. As for the suggestion that this was desperately unfair on a man whose life has been destroyed. I very much doubt that his life has been destroyed, and inasmuch as his business may have been - not sure if you noticed, but he did that all by himself.

I refuse to believe that user addstupidrandomnumbers notbotheredtoregisterpropername is a trained, qualified, actual lawyer.

They told son's private nursery that they must hand over all info, or else they would get the tribunal to issue and order for it.

The nursery were gutted.

liney she is but not in an area that needs compassion.

They regularly whinge that if SENDIST was a fair system then only 50% of parents would win their cases and 50% of LAs would win too.

I love that one. If they actually got their brains in gear, they could work out that if they just complied with the law scrupulously LAs would win at least 80% of SENDIST appeals and probably more - in fact, they would have a much smaller number of appeals to deal with, thus saving themselves even more money.

User, you keep coming back here to support MS; however, you've been asked a number of times why you thought his tweets weren't that bad, and haven't managed to answer. Do you think you could do so now?

As far as I know, the process of bringing an appeal has always been adversarial. At least, it has been for me. I think it's fairly unusual for a LA to be reasonable throughout although it can happen.

For me it was adversarial after the tribunal as well as before. Because my daughter was doing an ABA program, the council insisted on having termly, not annual reviews attended by the LA officer who had been the LA's main witness at the tribunal. At every meeting she tried having a dig at me, as well as making libellous comments about my daughter's consultant. The atmosphere was so tense that the school SENCO refused to chair the reviews and the head of the school had to agree to do it instead.

I've experienced such hostility from our LA that I assumed it would always be that way. But after all that rambling, what I'm trying to say is that the system has been like this for years, long before BS made an appearance and long before the Tories got in.

www.mdcomms.co.uk/blog/lawyers-stop-twitter/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork

I like the conclusion:

"The next repetitional challenge is for the councils. If they are properly shocked, nothing they do now can be allowed to echo what made those texts so bad. And I don’t just mean on Twitter.

Put starkly, can they behave towards parents with respect, politeness and intelligence? After all, they instructed Baker Small – ‘the client is king’ these days, and as the kitten in that ill-advised twitter post grows into a boring old mog, attention will turn back to the general behaviour of these councils.

I’m not sure parent-publishers are going to stop with one scalp if nothing changes."

I don't see how the LAs will possibly be able to get away with merely distancing themselves and then blaming everything on just Mark Small. Especially after the LGO's warning to them last year (see up thread). At the moment the LAs are running scared and answering to parent-power. But ultimately their attitude will be "it was him what made us do it". However this simply will not wash. If the high level of SENDIST complaints to LGO continue, and people complain about BS's involvement, then hopefully the LGO will uphold far more complaints then normal. The LGO's warning that the LAs are ultimately responsible for the quality of any service will have to come into play. (I hope I'm not too idealistic about that!)

The conclusion from the blog which Augusta linked to is certainly correct

I’m not sure parent-publishers are going to stop with one scalp if nothing changes

It would be interesting to know whether parents have complained to their LAs about BS's conduct - I suspect that quite a few have over the years. Those who continued to use them now need to explain why they did nothing about it till now. My guess is that, in many cases, it is because deep down their officers shared BS's view of parents and automatically discounted complaints as the moans of a few greedy people wanting Ferraris for their children.

The day to day stress of having a child with SN is nothing in comparison with the torturous stress (emotional, financial and mental) that parents who are understandably already struggling go through when faced with no option but to lose to a more savvy and powerful solicitor or drown under the necessity of hiring solicitors of their own ... to fight for what their DISABLED children NEED.
How is it right that families of children with disabilities should be disadvantaged by having to face solicitors at tribunal who represent LAs when merely asking for their children to have access to education and the support necessary for that to happen. This, in itself, is discriminatory.

Incidentally, how convenient to be able to excuse behaviour by claiming that 'he did it to me first' (email) when the evidence can't be seen as may be used as evidence for the police. Smells fishy to me. Like a naughty schoolboy who claims he only hit because someone wrote mean words in chalk but that the rain has washed them away. Missing the point: his behaviour reveals his attitude towards disabled children and their parents - contemptible. Even a child with disabilities knows to 'go and tell if someone hurts your body, feelings or threatens you'

My LA have confirmed that they don't use BS (they use their in house legal team) but I have my suspicions that they use the advice of BS wrt transfer from Statement to EHCP and the role of 'outcomes' in professional reports. My LA claim that outcomes are written first and then the provision needed to meet those outcomes. This appears to be identical to BS guidance:

search3.openobjects.com/mediamanager/buckinghamshire/fsd/docs/guidance_for_professional_report_writing.pdf

I wonder how much money has been paid for such advice by LAs struggling, and failing, to meet transfer deadlines?

My current/new LA said they do use BS and no plans to stop.

Then they said later they don't use and never had.

Then someone (not me, I was happy enough just that the future was looking better) sent them a link to a positive online FOI request I made when I became certain that due to behaviours of the LA he had followed me.

Then they said that they had used BakerSmall once after all, but won't again.

Tbf, the payments were relatively tiny and covered less than a year.

I continue to think of my LA as 'relatively' humane, though to be so in a sea of LAs who are not creates a higher demand for your service and put you at risk of becoming the national provider. Due to often abusive nature of the hired-in firm and the agressive way in which some parents are treated, moving LAs simply to get less grief or something towards what your child actually needs is common.

It 'may' look like SEND-Tourism, but the truth is, even with a tribunal hearing, children can only be given what they are legally entitled to, and only then if there is a decent amount of evidence that cheaper alternatives have not work (thereby the child has already been failed to an extent).

Augusta Ah yes the infamous Ferrari. A tweet that he made way back in December 2013 when he said that parents wanted everything but the Ferrari... (Again, this tweet was aimed at parents with disabled children).

Someone tweeted the leader of one council and asked if he was happy for his council to use the services of BS. The leader replied

" I am not [happy]. If they do work with us, I have asked that we terminate that relationship immediately. Disgusting man..."

Strong words. Let's hope similar strong words follow when councils begin to realise that they have to be held to account for this entire fiasco. I don't think they've twigged that yet in their race to distance themselves.

I hope there's some very uncomfortable meetings and questions going on behind closed doors at this moment!

That Ferrari comment left me speechless, I am so glad that people were savvy enough to take screenshots before he deleted it all.

I wonder if he will 'phoenix' the company with a new name? He certainly intends to carry on the field as it stands.

Has the Ferrari tweet been sent to the SRA?

The point here, is that the Ferrari comment underpins his training to Local Authorities.

No doubt LA staff are having a hard time, especially with resource limitations and, well dealing with the public in general isn't always easy, but to encourage their views of parents in this way is unethical, especially to those in a paid employment by the tax payer to deliver a service that is supposed to help them.

I am about to complain to the SRA (it's been taking me a while to draft the letter). I will include the tweet about the Ferrari. Should I link to this thread?