The essential Pre-action Protocol letter prior to any Judicial Review can't be done in the name of the child either; parents have to pay for that themselves. SOS!SEN are presently doing free ones for simple matters, but their own waiting list is long - and cheap PAP letters from solicitors are £1000. We've spent twice that in the past, with backs against the wall and before the SOS!SEN option. Just to access the courts, to stop our LA breaking the law.
You also can't do a JR if there is "a suitable alternative remedy". They flat out won't touch it. This means the LA can funnel you towards either a Tribunal (which takes a long time to reach, and then the LA ignore the legal 5 weeks to comply and take months - and there are no costs payable for Tribunals, so if parents need expert reports, or legal help, that's lost money) or the LGO, which takes even longer and has a slap-on-the-wrist approach and what they also say is "gestural" compensation... and they can't touch anything for which you can use a Tribunal, or anything relating to the ICO.
More than 90% of parents win at LGO level, and 98.3% at Tribunal, but by "win" we mean "re-make the decision as it should have been made in the first place, if the LA adhered to the law." That's not winning. That's trying to limit the loss.
The ICO, the Information Commissioners Office, handles refusals by the state to comply with the Subject Access Request - the demand that the LA give you all your info - and they slap them on the wrist and say "naughty, naughty" and still don't make them give you everything. Hilariously, the main reason I got a lot from ours is they didn't bother to read the documents properly. The downside of this was that they left random other kids's names unredacted. The good side was all manner of dirt embedded in documents, and even a document the cover letter said did not exist at all. But it took six months to get even that partial disclosure - and the timescale in law is a month.
The scandal of what is going on - just in our own case, they admit to lying to parents in internal emails with blithe confidence, when what they are admitting to lying about is breaking the law - should be Post Office level.
42% of SEN parents think about suicide, and the main reason isn't the support of their child: it's the stress and distress of dealing with the very services paid to support them.
There's research on school trauma and distress, and the vast majority affected are neurodivergent kids.
In 94.3% of cases, school attendance problems were underpinned by significant emotional distress, with often harrowing accounts of this distress provided by parents. While the mean age of the CYP in this sample was 11.6 years (StDev 3.1 years), their School Distress was evident to parents from a much younger age (7.9 years). Notably, 92.1% of CYP currently experiencing School Distress were described as neurodivergent (ND) and 83.4% as autistic.
Mental health difficulties in the absence of a neurodivergent profile were, however, relatively rare (6.17%). Concerningly, despite the striking levels of emotional distress and disability reported by parents, parents also reported a dearth of meaningful support for their CYP at school.
And people think removing autistic kids from state mainstreams is a choice.