In civil litigation parties will come to the table having both had the opportunity to obtain evidence including medical evidence and legal advice and to calculate past and future losses / needs. They come equipped with the information they need to reach a compromise.
In an SEN mediation the parent is often coming to the table not knowing what an adequate education for a child with SEN looks like. Usually the only 'evidence' are reports from SLT, OT, EP, Outreach, School etc which set out bands of provision, or a statement about what their service will provide, not a detailed assessment of needs or the provision to meet those needs. Many parents don't know what options exist for their child, they don't know what is possible.
Often SEN provision is poor. Most SEN professionals have a local monopoly for eg for speech therapy provision in schools. Autism Professionals can work in the sector for years and never have come across a single bit of evidence based practice they just carry out interventions 'because thats how we have always done it' or because that whats they learnt on a 1 day sensory course, or because they have been on a 5 day TEACCH course 10 years previously. Usually there is a one size fits all basic generic approach with pretty much zero evidence to support it. Most autism professionals and teachers I have met have themselves never seen good autism intervention.
How then does a parent prove that this piss poor provision will not meet their child's needs when there is no evidence other than their gut instinct and when all the LA obtained evidence points to this being sufficient (on the basis they have a policy thats says so). How does a non clued up parent not end up agreeing to a 'compromise' which in fact has no hope of meeting the needs of that individual child. How can you allow a compromise that gives the child less that the minimum education they need? How do you, a non autism specialist, know what a minimum adequate education for that child is - you have no EP or specialist panel to ask.
It seems to me you are starting from the position that an LA would never offer an inadequate education and never compromise below this basic level. The reality is LAs hand out this type of substandard provision day in and day out knowing it will not meet need but knowing it will kick the football a bit further down the road to the next years budget or the one after that.
4 years ago I was told my child did not need 1:1, did not need specialist teaching, would be fine in mainstream unsupported, and was not a danger to himself as they would draw a line on the floor near the fire door and tell him not to cross it and being autistic and rule driven he would be helpless but to obey. I was told this by the LA's most senior autism teacher. Had I listened to / being taken in / compromised about this utter crap my son would be dead by now having had to be scraped off the pavement when he escaped from nursery due to having no 1:1. He still requires specialist teaching - 35 hours a week 48 weeks a year the tribunal decided - 4 years later. We were stuck with their provision for 18 months while we went to tribunal - he learnt nothing despite having fulltime 1:1 for the last 12 months, thats right nothing. In fact he actually went backwards at nursery while we achieved good progress at home with private input. Hardly an adequate education. The tribunal awarded us 10 times the cost of the provision the LA deemed suitable and commented the LA were unable to persuade the tribunal it could provide for my son's needs in any of their own schools. How would you have known the LA could not meet need without questioning the autism teacher and EP who ran the service? How would you have seen through the lies the LA presented to the tribunal without an indep EP to help you out by asking pertinent and testing questions? What personal knowledge do you have of indep autism provision or provision in other LAs that would allow you to tell if the LA provision was up to scratch or not?
How can a LA get it so wrong that they were offering only 1/10th of the provision a tribunal decided was needed? Its not that the LA were clueless their own EP told them to provide the specialist support the tribunal eventually awarded - the LA very deliberately put my child in mainstream against all evidence and advice to save money, no other reason. How do you compromise with someone who is willing to break the law and force a child into certain failure for the sake of saving money? And when they can persuade their own autism teachers and mates in SLT to back them? When they threatened to remove all the funding from our private nursery for every child unless the nursery agreed not to give evidence against them?
How would you advise a parent in my situation who did not have the ability to see through the lies or to hire the indep experts to advise them?
Most of all how will you know at the end of the mediation that the compromise you have helped achieved is sufficient for that individual child when you have no specialist knowledge of how to teach an autistic child yourself and perhaps have never visited an autism school?
And before you argue that the zero achievement was because my son was so profoundly autistic he was incapable of being taught, I would say he is now exceeding all expectations and performing in line with his mainstream peers in many areas and above his peers in a few subjects. If I had accepted what was offered he would be like the child in the other Year 1 class who has not had good intervention and spends his days in severe distress throwing chairs, tantrumming on the floor, leading his clueless 1:1 a merry dance and generally learning nothing. His parents are not clued up, indeed for a long time they were in denial he had autism and were reluctant for any autism intervention to take place. What rights does that child have when he cannot speak for himself and there is no independent expert to speak for him? Who is going to achieve an adequate compromise or education for that child?