A council that received 1,200 complaints about its special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support in a single year recently attracted fresh criticism from a government watchdog.
Lancashire County Council received the 1,200 complaints in the year to July 2024 and had separately been criticised for its SEND services by education inspector Ofsted last year.
Cost to clear backlog
In September last year, the council said it may have to double the amount of money it spends on special needs if it is to clear its backlog of SEND assessments.
Lancashire said it planned to spend an additional £5.3m on processing the 1,850 cases
(based on the most recent total from summer 2025), which had yet to be considered by educational psychologists.
In the most recent criticism, public service watchdog the Local Government Ombudsman has investigated a family’s case that highlighted specific flaws in the council’s process for education, health and care plans (EHCPs).
EHCPs provide the legal framework to ensure children do not fall between the cracks and receive the support they need (How to get a school support plan, autumn 2025).
According to 2025 Department for Education statistics, 638,700 children and young people have active EHCPs, up from 576,500 active plans in January 2024.
In Lancashire, a parent had complained to the LGO about how the council dealt with her daughter’s EHCP, stating it had:
- Failed to decide whether to amend the EHCP before 2024
- Failed to meet statutory timescales when it decided to amend the plan in 2024
- Poor standards of communication and complaint handling.
Although the LGO said that complaints submitted for pre-2024 issues could not be investigated because they were out of time, it found the council at fault for missing statutory deadlines and for its communication and complaint handling from 2024 onwards.
The impact of this, said the LGO, was to cause the parent and child “significant distress, uncertainty, frustration and time and trouble”. The experience also “has impacted her health and taken away time that she should have spent caring”.
This caused significant injustice to the parent in the form of uncertainty and frustration
The mother had also said that her child’s school was deprived of some of the funding it needed to provide the education to which her daughter was entitled.
With reference to the communication and complaints handling, the ombudsman agreed the authority was at fault. This was because the parent had regularly contacted the council but its responses were delayed and it failed to resolve her concerns.
“This was fault which caused significant injustice to the parent in the form of uncertainty and frustration,” said the LGO. “To remedy the injustice, I recommend the council apologises and makes a symbolic payment to acknowledge the distress.”
The council agreed to apologise and paid the family £700 – £500 for the distress by failures to meet the statutory review timescales and its poor communication and £200 for the time and trouble caused by its poor complaint handling.
