New Page: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/support-send-kids/ 

Thank you so much for your support so far. We want to tell you what your support has helped us achieve to date, but more importantly, we want to ask for your help again so we can roll out phase two of our plan, grow the community and help more parents. 

We want SEND families to be able to navigate the many legal process and systems that they must get to grips with for their children clearly, without delay, without expensive legal bills, and with reduced stress.

To do that we are expanding our speaker series to provide more expert advice in new and related areas to the Noddy No-nonsense guide and we will continue to increase the content on the platform, re-engineer legal text, and also start to work to create workflows to manage all these different workstreams, which we believe will greatly support SEND families and make it easier and faster to get the help they need. But to achieve all that we need to raise more money!

So, before we update you on our achievements to date here is your call to action: 

- If you can, donate again and

- Share our new CrowdJustice page.

If you are not able to donate again, you can still be hugely helpful to us by sharing the page on your social media and sending it to a few of your friends. 

This is the link to our new page: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/support-send-kids/

Now for an update. This is what we have been able to achieve so far with your support: 

- We finally gained charitable status at the end of September 2021!

- We turned a pdf “textbook” on the SEN law that David had originally produced “pro-bono” 15+ years ago into 140 bite-size chunks of law on the SSK platform, making it more accessible to parents and the wider SEND community.

- We also made a short film with the barristers and the head of another charity called IPSEA and we broadcasted that on 24 March 2022 through the platform that we have built and also had the barristers on-hand to do live Q&A. You can find the links to this film on our page: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/support-send-kids/

- We are actively building a unique resource that is benefitting SEND kids and their families and enabling them to access the education they are entitled to.

Once again, thank you for your support 

SSK team

Hi, I’m Caroline Withers, a working mum with two children (one of whom is disabled), and legal director for a major UK business. I’m delighted to be joining Support SEND Kids as a trustee, and would like to share the reasons why your funding is so crucial to our mission to equip and educate parents and all those involved to ensure that every SEND child has the right to reach their potential.

My daughter Dottie is almost 5 and is simply amazing. She is sassy, strong-minded and funny. She has a very rare genetic condition with around 500 known cases globally. Dottie has so much potential and understands everything we say, but she is unable to talk, instead using Makaton signing and an ipad communication device. Given she is non-verbal and expected to remain so, she of course has special educational needs that require specialist support.

In my job as a lawyer, I’ve negotiated multi-billion-pound transactions and managed litigation against major corporates. No legal matter has however been more stressful for me than the battle I faced to secure appropriate education support for Dottie. What I discovered in this process horrified me.

An Education Health Care Plan (“EHCP”) is a legal document under the Children and Families Act 2014, outlining any special educational needs a child has and the provision a local authority (“LA”) must put in place to support them. Despite Dottie’s needs being so apparent, and her EHCP request being supported by her medical team and nursery, our LA refused to assess Dottie for an ECHP, pushing us into a lengthy appeal process. Once we secured our ECHP, our LA then sought to place Dottie in a mainstream school where she would not have been given the level of support required in her EHCP, requiring a further legal fight. I learned that due to funding issues, LAs are not motivated to enable children to thrive, but rather to refuse support at all costs. If a LA determines that it will be cheaper to lose an appeal, but delay provision of services to a child for a couple of terms, they will push parents to a legal process. This video details just some of the issues: https://youtu.be/WhEhm73n_XE

Last year SEND Tribunal panels upheld local authority decisions in only 193 of 3,770 hearings. This means Local Authorities acted unlawfully in 95% of cases. Costs are not recoverable for parents if they win. This is not only a colossal waste of public funds, but it weights the process heavily against already exhausted parents and creates a fundamental issue with lack of access to justice. Vulnerable children and families will be at a significant disadvantage.

There is no doubt that parenting a child with a disability or special needs is challenging – time is short, juggling medical and therapy appointments and managing your child’s day-to-day needs, as well as providing an income for your family. Research from Scope shows that, on average, a family with a disabled child would have to pay £581 a month to have the same standard of living as a family with a non-disabled child. For 1 in 5 families, these extra costs come to more than £1000 a month. Now add to this the many thousands of pounds in expert and legal fees it costs each time a family needs to advocate for their child’s rights in the next stage of their education. I’ve heard many stories of families re-mortgaging their homes and spending their life savings to secure an education for their disabled child. These families may have life-long debts as a consequence.

Parents’ energy and resources should be directed to the care and additional support that their child requires, not spent in unnecessary, exhausting and traumatic legal battles that end up all but bankrupting a family. I don’t feel good about the fact that my daughter gets to have the support she needs because she has a mother who is a lawyer, and we as a family can find the many thousands of pounds it takes to secure that support. This is not justice. This financial equality means that there will be thousands of children with bona-fide special needs going without the support they need to access education. This will have a profound and long-lasting effect on their ability to live independent lives – another false economy.

Support SEND Kids relies on volunteers and donations to democratise access to information to put parents and carers on an equal footing with LAs, making the process a little less overwhelming and more straightforward. Recently we worked with David Wolfe QC and Leon Glenister to digitise and host their definitive guide to SEN law, known as the ‘Noddy Guide’, a no-nonsense guide to SEN law reimagined in accessible Q&A format to give parents the same access to information as judges and LAs.

The goal is to both make the law accessible and to use the format to highlight and surface inconsistency and emerging issues that the SEN legal community can and will engage with, and as Leon hopes “start to address common problems” across local authority boundaries.

Please help us with your donations so that we can increase the reach of our services to as many people as possible.