Extraordinary SEND Reform, or Political Theatre?

Are you a local parent, carer, guardian, or a current/former employee of the council, a SENDCO, teacher, or teaching assistant? We'd love to hear your real-world experiences to help shape our future advocacy. Please email us in strict confidence at sen@melroseandco.uk.

The Reality Behind Derby City Council’s Deficit-Driven Blueprint

On Monday, 14 September 2026, Derby City Council’s Children, Young People and Skills Scrutiny Review Board convened to hear an upbeat presentation. Sharon Buckby, Director of Learning, Inclusion and Skills, delivered a 24-slide overview detailing how Derby plans to revolutionize Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision.

Elected members were presented with an impressive managerial turnaround: statutory timeliness for Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) had surged from a dismal 15% in January 2025 to 99% over the past 18 months. They were told that 100% of schools had signed an Inclusion Charter, parent satisfaction was at 73%, formal complaints were declining, and a pioneering "Social Contract" was launching to rebuild community trust. Local headlines quickly repeated the narrative that the council was moving "in the right direction."

However, beneath the managerial slides, buzzwords, and performative optimism lies a completely different reality.

When cross-referenced against the council’s own written scrutiny papers, leaked internal communications, Freedom of Information disclosures, and statutory data, this presentation was not an account of pedagogical progress. It was the public-relations rollout of a financial containment strategy designed to suppress statutory rights, ration support, and unlock a £20 million central government debt bailout.

Turning Children Down Before Experts Can Assess Them

Director Buckby assured councillors that Derby’s assessment processes are working with precision because nearly 100% of children who pass through the assessment gateway are ultimately issued an EHCP.

From the standpoint of primary legislation, that logic is completely backward.

Under Section 36(8) of the Children and Families Act 2014, the legal threshold to secure an Education, Health and Care Needs Assessment (EHCNA) is deliberately set low. Parliament designed the law so that a local authority must assess if a child "may" have special educational needs and it "may" be necessary for provision to be made through a plan. The law was constructed this way for an obvious reason: to ensure that borderline, complex, or emerging needs are thoroughly investigated by independent clinical, medical, and educational psychology experts.

If an assessment gateway is operating at the lawful threshold, a significant portion of assessed children will naturally be evaluated by experts and found not to require the full statutory weight of an EHCP.

When a council boasts a near-100% conversion rate from assessment to plan, it proves the initial gateway has been set unlawfully high. It means the council is only agreeing to assess children when officers have already decided upfront that an EHCP is unavoidable.

Official Department for Education (DfE) statutory figures confirm this gatekeeping:

• Derby City Council turns down almost 45% of all initial requests for an EHC needs assessment - substantially higher than the national average refusal rate of 29%.
• Nearly half of all children are turned down at the very first hurdle, not because educational psychologists or pediatricians evaluated them and said they were fine, but because an internal administrative panel rejected them on paper before an expert was ever allowed to meet them.
• Director Buckby highlighted that while the rest of the region saw a surge in assessment requests following national reform discussions, Derby saw no such spike. That absence of growth is not evidence of local contentment; it is the predictable outcome of a system that exhausts school staff with endless non-statutory toolkits, checklists, and administrative roadblocks before an assessment can even be registered.

The Neurodiversity "Disappearance" Trick

One of the most alarming revelations in the Scrutiny meeting involved the council’s approach to clinical waiting lists.

Leadership announced plans to cut waiting lists for neurodiversity and CAMHS assessments by 20%. Pointing to an Early Years triage pilot, Buckby noted that "only 23% of children then progressed on to an assessment because then the remaining children's needs could be met" in the classroom setting.

Basic classroom strategies do not cure autism, ADHD, or complex developmental disorders.

Diverting children away from clinical assessments provides an immediate administrative double-win for the council: it artificially slashes official waiting lists, and it prevents the creation of an independent medical paper trail that could legally obligate the council to fund specialist support.

The long-term impact on the child, however, is devastating. Denying children timely clinical identification leaves them without formal recognition as academic demands increase. As neurodivergent children progress through education without diagnosis or legal protection, unsupported sensory distress and executive dysfunction inevitably manifest as emotional distress, academic decline, school-induced anxiety, and classroom breakdown.

Hollow Metrics: Manufactured Timeliness, Provision Stripping & The 2-Year Trap

How did Derby City Council accelerate its 20-week statutory EHCP timeliness from 15% to 99% in just 18 months?

Evidence gathered across the local community reveals that this metric has not been driven by sudden operational efficiency, but by administrative triage, generic drafting, and systemic legal attrition:

• Automated Batch-Processing: Across the city, multiple families have reported receiving formal legal defenses and statutory consultation responses populated with the private medical records, dates of birth, and emotional views of completely unrelated children. Rather than conducting individualized evaluations, the department has relied on mass-produced, cut-and-paste templates to process statutory workloads without meaningful human review.
• Gutting Legally Binding Provision: When plans are finalized within the 20-week deadline, families routinely find that specific hours of support, specialist therapies, and adult-to-pupil ratios have been systematically stripped from Section F. In direct contravention of binding case law (L v Clarke), caseworkers insert vague phrases such as "access to adult support" or "regular check-ins." The council hits its 20-week performance metric on paper, but leaves the child with an unenforceable plan that delivers zero guaranteed support in the classroom.
• The "Try Our Luck" Legal Strategy: Leaked internal emails have exposed the council’s internal litigation culture: senior SEND managers have explicitly instructed caseworkers to avoid binding statutory Consent Orders and "try our luck" at the First-tier Tribunal, even while internally acknowledging that the council possesses no legal defense.
• The 18-to-20-Month Litigation Trap: This tactic of administrative delay is magnified by the national tribunal crisis. As of late 2026, the First-tier Tribunal is frequently listing appeal hearings for Spring 2028 - an 18-to-20-month wait. When the council systematically forces parents through a cycle of appealing a refusal to assess, appealing an initial refusal to issue, and then appealing a stripped-back final plan, a disabled child spends three to four years in procedural limbo without enforceable support. For an authority managing a deficit, every month spent stuck in the tribunal queue is another month that statutory provision remains off the council's balance sheet.

The Human Cost Conceded: Exclusions, Absenteeism, and Staff Burnout

While the public presentation celebrated 100% of schools signing an Inclusion Charter, the council’s internal papers reveal an education system under immense strain.

Tucked away in the council's internal risk register is a startling admission: leadership explicitly acknowledges the operational assumption and risk that their reforms will cause an immediate "increase in negative outcomes such as exclusions, and suspensions" alongside widespread "burnout of staff."

Why would inclusive reform trigger staff burnout and classroom exclusions?

Because the council's strategy relies on offloading complex special educational needs onto mainstream classrooms without transferring the statutory funding needed to resource them. Mainstream teachers and SENDCOs are placed in an impossible position: they are barred from accessing statutory top-up funding, subjected to bureaucratic bottlenecks, and left to manage severe distress in classes of thirty pupils. When classrooms are overwhelmed and resources are withheld, schools are forced to rely on punitive discipline.

The human fallout is already visible in the council’s own data:

• Out of 6,991 pupils registered on SEN Support across Derby, 6,800 have an attendance record of less than 60% - representing a catastrophic level of persistent emotional school-based non-attendance.
• In Locality 2 alone, permanent secondary exclusions nearly doubled between 2024/25 and 2025/26, with that single area accounting for over 54% of all permanent secondary exclusions and 58% of all secondary suspensions across the entire city.

The Real Motive: The £20 Million Deficit Bailout

Why is Derby City Council so determined to gatekeep assessments, strip provision, and force mainstream containment at the expense of staff and pupils?

The answer is found in Section 7.2 of the written Scrutiny Report:

• Derby City Council closed the 2025/26 financial year with a cumulative High Needs Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) deficit of £23.274 million.
• Under the DfE's High Needs Stability Grant, central government has offered to pay off up to 90% of this deficit - roughly £20 million.
• But the cash comes with a strict contractual condition: "This grant will only be paid once each local authority has secured national approval of their local area's Local SEND Reform Plan. Local authorities will not receive any payments until their Local SEND Reform Plan has been approved."

To secure the £20 million bailout needed to prevent municipal insolvency, the council must demonstrate to the DfE that it can suppress expenditure. The presentation slides set out the explicit target for 2029: "Reduced growth in EHCP demand through earlier intervention" to build a "financially sustainable" system.

Enforcing an Unlegislated, Stalled White Paper

To justify this containment strategy, the council pointed to the government's White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, framing their local plan as direct compliance with national direction.

What the council failed to disclose is that central government and the Department for Education have effectively stepped back from these proposals.

Following widespread sector-wide backlash from parent advocacy groups, disabled people's organizations, and legal experts, the DfE paused its legislative timetable. The government confirmed that no primary legislation will take effect until 2029 at the earliest, opened secondary consultations, and publicly reaffirmed that the Children and Families Act 2014 and the statutory 2015 SEND Code of Practice remain the supreme, unamended law of the land today.

Why is Derby City Council enforcing non-statutory "Targeted Plus," mandatory "Individual Support Plans" (ISPs), and restrictive school gateways in Autumn 2026?

Because the council is not waiting for Parliament to change the law. It is attempting to enforce the operational mechanics of an unlegislated White Paper on local families three years ahead of schedule, purely to hit the DfE's cost-containment benchmarks.

The "Social Contract": Preaching Partnership While Concealing the Rules

The centerpiece of Buckby’s address was the upcoming rollout of a city-wide "Social Contract" in October 2026, intended to "guide behavior, build trust, and define mutual responsibilities." The policy focuses on pushing attendance responsibilities onto families and discouraging elective home education.

Trust cannot exist without institutional transparency. The council's actual administrative conduct reveals a persistent avoidance of open governance:

• Concealing the Rulebook: Under Section 30 of the Children and Families Act 2014 and Schedule 2 of the SEND Regulations 2014, local authorities have an absolute statutory duty to publish their resource allocation policies, banding criteria, and decision-making thresholds on their Local Offer. Transparent authorities (such as Bristol, Norfolk, and Wiltshire) routinely publish their full banding matrices, point systems, and cash values online. Derby City Council has kept its internal funding matrix hidden. When residents submitted Freedom of Information requests for the scoring criteria and mathematical conversion formulas used to fund disabled children, the council issued a refusal, citing Section 31 (Law Enforcement and Cyber Security) exemptions.
• Zero Governance and Missing Impact Assessments: The council’s external legal representatives conceded in writing that the local funding matrix governing millions of pounds in SEND provision had no Cabinet minutes, no executive sign-off, and was developed by an undocumented informal "working group." When asked under FOI for the mandatory Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) evaluating how this tool impacts neurodivergent pupils, the council formally responded: "Information not held."
• Pre-Determined Funding: Page 14 of the council's internal staff training manual explicitly instructs officers that "EHCPs that are written will have funding calculated prior to consultation with schools." Calculating a child's funding band before consulting schools on the provision required to meet their needs is a textbook example of unlawful, resource-led decision-making under Section 42 of the 2014 Act.
• School Coercion & Gagging Directives: While the council promotes collaboration, evidence from schools reveals that senior management has convened closed-door meetings with headteachers, urging them to lower statutory funding requests to fit pre-determined budget ceilings. School staff have even reported instructions directing them not to discuss funding allocations or shortfalls with parents, undermining the statutory duty of co-production.
• "Funding Is Not for Parents to Decide": Director Buckby’s documented administrative position - informing parents that funding is not for parents to decide - reflects the leadership's true ethos.

A local authority that circumvents primary legislation, withholds its funding criteria behind police exemptions, and pressures school leaders into suppressing evidence lacks the moral standing to lecture families on a "social contract."

The Real Numbers: Tribunals and Ombudsman Rulings

Buckby assured elected members that tribunals are dropping, formal complaints are down, and Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) investigations are now "almost nothing."

The objective performance data tells an entirely different story:

• The Tribunal Concession Reality: Nationally, Ministry of Justice statistics confirm that parents win between 95% and 99% of all SEND Tribunal hearings decided by a judge. In Derby, the perceived drop in formal tribunal hearings is driven by the council’s practice of playing legal attrition - maintaining defenses until the eleventh hour, only to concede just before reaching the hearing room. This avoids a formal judicial defeat on the public record while still forcing families through months of exhausting delay.
• The Ombudsman Uphold Rate: Official LGSCO performance data exposes the inaccuracy of the council's claims:

• In 2023/24, the Ombudsman investigated 18 complaints and upheld 14 (78%).
• In 2024/25, the Ombudsman investigated 14 complaints and upheld 13 (93%).
  In 2025/26, investigations did not disappear - they rose to 17, with 16 upheld (a staggering 94% uphold rate), compared to an 85% average in similar authorities.
• Adjusted for population, Derby recorded 5.8 upheld decisions per 100,000 residents, higher than the national benchmark of 5.6.

When the Ombudsman investigates Derby City Council, it finds fault and maladministration 94% of the time. The council is not resolving disputes through improved service; it relies on legal attrition and statutory technicalities (whereby matters undergoing Tribunal appeals are barred from Ombudsman review) to keep the true scale of systemic failure off the public record.

The Public Demand: Democratic Transparency Over Managerial Slides

If Derby City Council’s SEND reforms are genuinely focused on supporting children, the directorate should have no reason to hide its policies from public scrutiny.

Accountability cannot be established through high-level slide decks presented to a scrutiny committee. The local community requires answers to five clear demands:

• Publish the Full Draft Plan: Why has the full Local SEND Reform Plan submitted to the DfE in June 2026 not been published in full for democratic scrutiny?
• Publish the Equality Impact Assessment: Where is the formal, published EIA demonstrating that the council’s funding thresholds and inclusion criteria do not unlawfully disadvantage neurodivergent pupils?
• Release the Full Rulebook: When will the council publish the scoring criteria, matrix descriptors, and mathematical weighting logic used to determine school funding, without redactions or cybersecurity exemptions?
• Publish Decision-Making Criteria: Will the council provide full, transparent data detailing the exact evidence and criteria used by internal panels to reject statutory assessment requests, rather than retrospective summary charts?
• Commit to Ending Administrative Pressure: Will senior leadership publicly instruct officers to cease closed-door meetings that pressure headteachers and SENDCOs into altering statutory paperwork or suppressing funding requests?

Genuine inclusion cannot be built upon secret formulas, suppressed evidence, and procedural delay. Until Derby City Council publishes its full rulebooks and subjects its policies to democratic scrutiny, its reforms will remain political theatre designed to balance a municipal budget at the expense of vulnerable children.

Are you a local parent, carer, guardian, or a current/former employee of the council, a SENDCO, teacher, or teaching assistant? We'd love to hear your real-world experiences to help shape our future advocacy. Please email us in strict confidence at sen@melroseandco.uk.