It was as a last resort that Paul McAnenny launched an online fundraiser to help him pay for the fuel needed to drive his son to a special school on the other side of Birmingham, a 90-minute round trip on top of the school run for his two older daughters.
Three-year-old Tommy, who is deaf and has Charge syndrome, which affects his breathing and heart, was given a space at the school through an education health and care plan (EHCP) earlier this year to help with his early learning and development – crucial for someone with his condition.
McAnenny said he was led to believe Birmingham city council would cover the transport costs, but owing to cost-cutting measures brought in since the council’s effective bankruptcy last year, all young people outside compulsory school age no longer get automatic access to council-funded transport.
“It’s emotionally and physically draining at the moment,” McAnenny said, adding that Tommy’s school run costs an extra £160 a month in fuel. “I recently started a part-time job to try to give me some extra money to fund taking him to school, but it’s difficult as I’m his carer, I only really have a few hours in the middle of the day. We’ve appealed to the council but we could be waiting months.
“I don’t know what else to do.”
McAnenny is one of many parents on the frontline of the nationwide crisis in support and resources for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), a crisis that is especially acute in areas with cash-strapped local authorities.
Send services are often one of the first to go as councils seek to streamline their budgets, and in turn parents are increasingly having to resort to appeals and tribunals to get the support they need.
In Birmingham, the number of tribunals brought against the city council on Send decisions has risen from 291 in 2020, to 525 in 2022, and only 3.7% were found in the council’s favour. It is estimated the authority spent £10m fighting Send appeals between 2014 and 2021.
“It’s horrendous. They just keep repeating the same process over and over again, and there’s a huge cost of that,” said Sabiha Aziz, a longtime campaigner for Send issues in Birmingham. “The cost is we’ve children not in education, and there’s no urgency around it.
“People seem quite happy to have our Send cohort languishing at home. Then sometimes they get into trouble, get into gangs or crime, and everybody is talking about these youngsters causing problems. Well, actually, they’re being let down by the services that should be ensuring they’re in school.”
She previously took the council to a tribunal to get her son Adam, who is severely learning disabled and has non-verbal autism and epilepsy, a place at a specialist school. This year, she successfully fought for the council to continue providing his school transport, which was set to be cut as Adam was 18 and no longer of compulsory school age.
“It wasn’t a win, because of the toll it took on us. Every single day from May to September was consumed with this battle to reinstate his transport during the summer holiday, which is supposed to be quality time with my son,” she said. “My whole life is consumed with this. I’m 48 years old now and I’m starting to see the impact of it, the stress takes it toll.
“This is ‘the village’ that’s supposed to be helping me raise my young person, but it feels like I’m actually in a war with them. Adam is not life-limited, he could live to be an old man at 80 or 90. He deserves to have a purposeful life.”
One of the issues, she says, is Birmingham’s size. It is the largest local authority in the country, with one of the youngest populations, and the council’s poor finances are putting huge strain on already overstretched services.
In the 2023-24 academic year, more than one in seven schoolchildren in Birmingham were receiving special education needs support, higher than the national average (13.6%), and more than 8,500 pupils were on an EHCP.
In 2021, the council’s Send provision was subject to unprecedented government intervention after inspections found a number of failings.
“The bigger the city, the higher the numbers, the bigger the challenges are going to be. So when we see things falling and crumbling at a national level, it’s always going to impact Birmingham far worse than does anybody else,” Aziz said.
“The council situation is intensifying what was already a crisis. They’re going after services that have already been streamlined. But what really infuriates me is, why is the axe falling here?”
Ellie and Matt Partridge have first-hand experience of the council’s appeals and tribunals process, having fought to get their four-year-old son, Frank, a place at a specialist school and then again to get him transport.
“Honestly, I feel like I do have post-traumatic stress disorder from it because it was just so, so stressful,” said Ellie. “We had to pay about £700 for an advocate to help us, to take the stress off, the forms were so overwhelming and there was a lot of jargon. At one point I just said to Matt, I want to quit, just let them have what they want, I can’t fight any more.”
The couple said that as well as paying privately for an advocate, they prepared a 250-page evidence bundle explaining why Frank, who has been diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay, deserved a place at a specialist school.
In the end, the tribunal lasted 20 minutes, with the judge ruling in the parents’ favour. “They just didn’t have a leg to stand on. These tribunals are all ridiculous situations,” said Matt.
They then had to go through another appeals process in order to get school transportation for Frank – the couple do not drive, the public transport links are poor and Frank does not walk, so they were faced with the prospect of paying for taxis every day.
“It was a ridiculous amount of money. It was like being back to square one,” Matt said.
Meanwhile, Tommy’s parents are waiting for a stage 2 appeal, where they will again try to persuade Birmingham council their son needs transport provided. They are being supported by the National Deaf Children’s Society, which said there had been a 44% increase in the number of active tribunal cases it was supporting compared with last year.
“The whole process is exhausting because it’s the not knowing and being fobbed off by them and constantly being rejected,” said McAnenny. “The whole thing is just ridiculous.”
Sue Harrison, the strategic director of children and families at Birmingham city council, said there was a “general acceptance that our national Send system is broken”.
“The city’s Send services are currently on an improvement journey and the Send commissioner’s third report acknowledges the improvements made, which reflects a huge amount of work by all involved,” she said.
She added that many local authorities had made the difficult decision to reduce transport support for non-compulsory school-age students but the council provided additional discretionary support for families to make their own arrangements.
She said the national issue of waiting lists for tribunal hearings was “outside the council’s control”.
“As demand increases the number of mediations and tribunals remain consistent. The team continues to meet the statutory timescales,” she said. “We will collectively continue to do all we can to drive forward further improvements, so families get the service they need and deserve.”