Open Letter to Rt. Hon. BRIDGET PHILLIPSON MP, Secretary of State for Education

Re: Urgent concerns over unlawful conduct, maladministration, and breakdown of accountability at Surrey County Council in the management of their statutory SEND responsibilities.

June 2025

Dear Rt. Hon. Bridget Phillipson, MP,

We are writing to you today not as professionals, politicians, or campaigners — but as parents and carers of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in Surrey, because we believe Surrey County Council (SCC) is presiding over one of the most serious and sustained breakdowns in public service in recent memory.

Three months ago, a group of Surrey MPs – led by Chris Coghlan – wrote to you outlining their grave concerns about the leadership and conduct of SCC’s SEND Services including the Leader of the Council lying to MPs in a formal written response about SEND. To date – not one of those serious governance concerns have been either acknowledged or addressed.

Meanwhile, the Chief Executive of Surrey County Council has separately received a private letter from your Junior Minister expressing continued confidence in the Council’s progress. This letter has since been repeatedly and publicly cited by SCC as evidence of improvement – despite families, providers, and professionals unanimously flagging devastating, ongoing, rapid decline.

This week, in Parliament, in response to a question from Al Pinkerton MP, you acknowledged that you have not yet responded to the concerns raised and provided assurance that you would “consider” an inquiry.

Respectfully, families in Surrey do not need consideration. They need intervention. They need protection. They need enforcement.

We strongly reject the suggestion that our experiences are simply emblematic of a pressured system, or that this relates to historic issues. The data does not support that claim, and nor does our daily lived reality. What we are bearing witness to is a Local Authority that seems to have normalised unlawful conduct in breach of their statutory SEND Duties, eroded public trust, and is systematically dismantling the protective framework the law is meant to provide. A framework that this Council’s Leadership are now leading national lobbying efforts to disassemble, despite this framework offering the only relief from persistent and sustained efforts of this Local Authority to withhold and withdraw essential support, in many instances against the qualified and expert advice of all professionals involved with the child.

To support the MPs’ call, we are now submitting, for the public record, our personal testimonies. Our experiences. Sadly, these accounts are not isolated incidents; they reveal recurring patterns of obstruction, misinformation, unlawful decision making and harm. What is not included here are the experiences of the hundreds of other families who, either fearing recrimination or further discrimination or simply through exhaustion, feel unable to speak publicly.

What these testimonies expose cannot be dismissed as “a system under strain.” That phrase seeks to excuse what should alarm us all: a culture where unlawful decisions have become routine, where accountability has all but vanished, and where children’s futures are knowingly risked behind a wall of denial.

This is not just a failure of service delivery. It is a failure of duty. A betrayal of trust at the cost of thousands of vulnerable children, young people, and their families.

We urge you to take action now.

This is not speculation. The evidence is clear and alarming:

• Surrey has been responsible for more registered appeals than any other Local Authority for the previous three years. Despite their protestations of improvement, the number has skyrocketed even further in the last 12 months, reaching over 1,000 registered appeals by the end of 2024. Families like ours are being faced with legally erroneous and irrational decisions. In many cases these decisions go against all available evidence and advice and are issued with no rationale. Any attempt to engage with the LA for clarification or discussion is met with the response that their only recourse is to appeal. Consequently, the system is flooded.

• The very same local authority whose leadership are publicly decrying Tribunal as unnecessary, adversarial, and bureaucratic are effectively weaponising appeals, not as a remedy of last resort (as intended), but as a routine mechanism of avoidance and attrition. The absurdity of this cannot be overstated: they are abusing the legal framework so systematically that they have helped create the pressure they now claim as evidence of a ‘broken system’, leaving hundreds of vulnerable children exposed to avoidable trauma, harm, and educational neglect as a result.

• As a specific example last year, many families in Surrey who had their EHCPs rapidly issued by a so-called ‘recovery team’ found that they contained incorrect information and were missing large chunks of essential advice, purportedly to “release a family’s appeal rights.” The result? Whilst this county is publicly proclaiming its ‘improved timeliness’, it has simultaneously forced large volumes of families straight into appeal. In many instances, families find that Surrey then fails to engage in the appeal process for many months, failing to respond, to submit evidence, to attend case management reviews, leaving their vulnerable child in limbo, and often crisis. Some families report only hearing from the Tribunal Officer a matter of weeks, even days of the final hearing. As already reported to you by MPs, written testimony by Surrey’s own SEND case officers has attested to the huge issues this has created- yet Surrey persists in publicly claiming this as the very centerpiece of its improvement.

• Surrey has been subject to multiple enforcement actions by the Ministry of Justice SEND Tribunal (SENDIST), including rapidly growing numbers of barring orders for non-compliance – a deeply concerning and almost unprecedented situation for a public body. It is our understanding that SENDIST have attempted to raise these conduct issues with Surrey County Council directly, but their interventions have been ignored.

• Surrey is increasingly failing to comply with Tribunal decisions – despite these being binding legal obligations. In this County, pre-action letters and Judicial Review proceedings have become necessary enforcement tools for families, and even these are sometimes ignored. This alone underscores the deep concern among families that – despite repeated assurances of “improvement” – the situation is deteriorating further and that this Local Authority displays an astonishing disregard for the law. Where such legal breaches are knowingly ongoing, it is simply unconscionable that this is allowed to continue in a public body without intervention.

• Over 230 education-related complaints were escalated to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman last year for the second consecutive year — and more than any other council in England. SCC withheld this data from scrutiny reports for over 14 months. It has now also set about reclassifying complaints as enquiries, while simultaneously claiming complaints are reducing. Furthermore, given that you are unable to complain about many issues while in legal appeal, by pushing over 1,000 families to appeal last year alone, they have also minimised the number of formal complaints recorded and escalated – further distorting scrutiny and undermining accountability.

• Despite repeated rulings from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman relating to serious, prolonged breaches of section 19 of the Education Act 1996, hundreds of children in Surrey are repeatedly being left without education for 6, 12, even 24 months – in some cases even in direct contradiction to Tribunal decisions. SCC persists in failing to report transparently on this issue, with many of these children still recorded as on-roll but absent from schools that have no means to support them. These are undoubtedly the real ‘ghost’ children of this so-called SEND crisis.

• More than 100 serious data breaches — involving detailed sensitive personal, social, and medical information relating to vulnerable children and their families — occurred within SCC’s SEND team last year alone. These breaches were not disclosed in public scrutiny documents, and when a Member’s Question finally revealed the extent and depth of the data breaches, SCC confirmed that none of these had been reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

• Providers, schools, and families report severe and repeated delays in payment for legally mandated provision, often without communication, explanation, or justification. Some providers now refuse to work with Surrey, citing persistent non-payment and the financial risk it entails.

• And for us as families — the 2024 Parent Carer Survey results, an extensive and detailed survey, completed in late autumn of 2024, relaying the detailed experiences of over 1,300 children and young people, was suppressed for over five months and only published under pressure. Unsurprisingly, it revealed that just 4.3% of families now believe this Council acts in their child’s best interests. This catastrophic collapse in trust was excluded from public statements and omitted from key scrutiny committees for over five months – with the Leader of this Council instead publicly claiming that “the vast majority of children and families [those children with SEND] are in high quality education and happy with their support “. This is an appalling misrepresentation of reality, a baseless assertion that stands in direct contradiction to the only verifiable source of feedback: the 2024 Parent Carer Survey, which demonstrates overwhelmingly that the very opposite is true.

A culture of denial, not improvement

When a Chief Executive refers to “articulate parents” as “Surrey’s particular problem”, when Officers suppress performance data, and when the Leader of the Council dismisses serious concerns raised by MPs rather than address the failures they expose- this is not the behaviour of a council seeking improvement.

It is the behaviour of a public body more concerned with preserving its reputation than upholding the law- or protecting the vulnerable children it exists to serve.

Meanwhile, as families are pushed to the brink, forced into appeals, absorbing funding shortfalls, and navigating silence- those responsible are being elevated to national leadership:

• The Leader of SCC now Chairs the County Councils Network — the self-described “Voice of England’s Counties.”
• Its former Chief Executive now heads the Local Government Association — the “national voice of local government.”
• Its Director of Children’s Services now serves as President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services — “leading the sector and shaping policy for children and families.”

These are not honorary titles, they come with influence. Collectively, they represent the primary lobbying and representative bodies influencing national policy on local government and children’s services in England. Together, they form a powerful policy-shaping bloc shaping Local Government and SEND Policy in England- and at the helm of each sits a leader from Surrey County Council.

So, when those who have presided over widespread legal breaches, record levels of complaint, systemic dysfunction and maladministration in Surrey are entrusted to lead plans for national reform – a simple question must be asked:

Is this the standard we now reward?

…And sadly, the answer to this question should send a warning to the family of every child with SEND right across this country.

Even the Chair of SCC’s own Children’s Services Select Committee, Cllr Fiona Davidson, has said this Directorate should be broken up:

“Far too often it presents as a cold, uncaring bureaucracy more interested in maintaining its position than the wellbeing of children… At the heart of the Directorate’s issues with SEND is organisational culture. And culture is very difficult to change from within.”

Cllr Fiona Davidson, 7 May 2025

When those charged with scrutiny speak this plainly, what explains the continued silence from national institutions?

Please be under no illusion. The harm is real. Current. And Ongoing.

In many affected households, at least one parent or carer is forced to give up work. Children are left isolated – without education, without support – their chances of a stable, independent future severely compromised. Families are driven into financial hardship. Marriages fracture and mental health collapses. At worst? In avoidable deaths as documented in Coroner’s Reports.

When this occurs due to a shortage of suitable school places or support, it is tragic. When it occurs a result of maladministration, and unlawful decision-making? It is indefensible.

So, when we are forced to confront the devastating truth – that the very services designed to protect and support our children are, in fact, complicit in their harm – is it any wonder that trust in this Council has all but collapsed?

This is not a capacity crisis. It is a breakdown of integrity.

Surrey often frames this as a “communication issue.” But we, as families, are here to say — we are not confused.

We are ignored. We are misled. We are dismissed.

This is not poor communication; It is evasive, obstructive, and unlawful conduct.

The Leader of this Authority frequently speaks of the “burning platform” facing local government finances in the coming months. But we are here to say: the crisis faced in Surrey is far more existential.

The Nolan Principles – integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership – exist to safeguard public trust. When public bodies repeatedly violate them with impunity, and when leaders of authorities with performance so dysfunctional that key data is omitted from their own reports, are trusted to lead national reform – this is no longer a system under pressure.

It is a system in breach.

As one parent asked: “MPs? Councillors? Are you aware of this? In your role as elected representatives, did you ever agree to overlook systemic law-breaking — at the expense of hundreds of children?”

So, Minister, we now come to you, with one question? Is this is acceptable to you?

As Parents and Carers of children with SEND in Surrey, we are calling for:

1. A Judge-led public inquiry into the conduct, culture, expenditure and legal compliance of Surrey County Council’s SEND services – with full powers to examine evidence, hear testimony, and make binding recommendations;

• The immediate appointment of independent oversight to monitor SCC’s complaint handling, compliance with Tribunal orders, and fulfilment of statutory duties, including the urgent allocation of support for children with no statutory educational provision confirmed for September 2025.

• A formal public response to the serious concerns raised by MPs in February.

This is not a breakdown in communication. Or a so-called ‘relational issue’. It is a breakdown in lawful governance in this Local Government- with devastating consequences for children and families. We are asking you to uphold the law. And to hold that line.

Because if the law cannot protect our children? It protects no one.

Yours Faithfully,

Parents and Carers of children and young people with Special Educational Needs in Surrey