How do LAs avoid maladministration findings in SEND?

The move that prevents most findings

Fix process, not decisions: meet EHC assessment and review timescales, deliver every Section F provision, and remedy delay fast. Delay and non-delivery, not plan content, drive almost all upheld SEND findings (2024-25). The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (the LGSCO, the body that investigates councils) cannot rule on whether a plan names the right school or sets the right support. That is for the SEND Tribunal, and section 26 of the Local Government Act 1974 keeps it out of the Ombudsman’s reach. So a council does not avoid findings by defending the merits of a decision. It avoids them by running the process and arranging the support without the faults the Ombudsman actually upholds.

The scale of the problem is operational, not judgemental. SEND complaints make up 27% of all complaints the LGSCO receives and 48% of the cases it upholds, and upheld SEND complaints rose by about 25% in a single year. The recurring fault is time: one council took 16 months to allocate an educational psychologist for an EHC needs assessment. Almost none of these turn on contested professional judgement.

The practices that hold the timescales

Treat each statutory clock as a tracked deadline with a named owner, not a target. The core windows are fixed in the SEND Regulations 2014: a new EHC needs assessment and any plan must be completed within 20 weeks; at annual review the meeting outcome must be reported to the council within 2 weeks of the review meeting, the decision on whether to amend follows within 4 weeks of the review, and any amended plan must be issued within 8 weeks of the proposed amendments notice.

• Track every deadline. Hold one list of live cases against their statutory dates, with an owner per case and an escalation trigger before each window closes, not after.
• Communicate when you will slip. The Ombudsman expects councils to tell families proactively when a deadline will be missed. Silence converts a delay into an avoidable injustice.
• Deliver Section F. Once a plan is final, the provision specified in Section F has to be put in place. A plan on paper with the support not arranged is the second most common fault after raw delay.
• Remedy injustice promptly. Where delay causes significant injustice, including delaying a parent’s right to appeal, offer a proportionate symbolic payment and restore any lost provision before the complaint escalates.

Closing the loop so the fault does not repeat

When the Ombudsman makes a recommendation, the value is not the payment to one family. It is the service-improvement action that stops the same fault recurring across the caseload. Councils tell researchers they value these recommendations but often lack the resources to implement them, which is exactly how a one-off finding becomes a pattern. Embed each recommendation as a tracked change to the process that produced the fault, and report on whether it worked.

The reframe to hold onto: the LGSCO does not find maladministration over the content of a plan, only over how the council ran the process and delivered the support. For where the line sits between the Ombudsman and the Tribunal, see when a council can be taken to the Local Government Ombudsman over SEND.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.