Dear Ms Keegan & Your Department For Education

We write to you as parents of children with special educational needs up and down the UK  with one simple request: please stop blaming us for the failing SEND education system. We are suffering the consequences but we are not the cause.

In a recent article you stated “that parents use the ‘tribunal factor’ to get our children into very expensive independent schools’. This accusation is not only incorrect but also deeply hurtful and frustrating. Going to tribunal is a stressful, lengthy, heartbreaking process that few would chose unless desperate. When parents do, the aim is not to get their children into a ‘very expensive independent schools’, it is for them to go to a school that halfway meets their needs which sometimes are complex, often made more so by a system that too often fails them. Provision is often put in place too late and our children's needs in turn end up much higher yet for some reason we are seen as unreasonable to asking for what our children are entitled to.  We feel like rather than address the actual problem you are blaming us using a narrative that is completely misleading.

If local authority schools were available that met our children’s needs and local authorities ensured provision was correctly in place then no one would need to consider the tribunal route.  Yet our reality is that we face 317 local authorities with different sets of processes, pathways, thresholds, hoops and panels that do not reflect the laws that your government installed, with special schools thin on the ground. We have to deal with this alongside a culture that is labeling us as demanding for going through horrible stressful negotiations to try and get our kids help when what is being awarded clearly isn’t enough. We wouldn’t be doing our job as parents if we didn’t.

So please Ms Keegan, blaming us achieves nothing constructive and instead just creates further division and misunderstanding. Please be our leader here and turn this situation around by advocating for and putting in place effective policies that will create improved resources and support systems for our children.  We want our children to go to school, we don’t want them to be absent but we need your help to make sure that they can do this.

Yours Sincerely