Help Measure what Matters challenge the practices that leave children without education… and families fighting the same battles, again and again.

A child’s education should never depend on whether a council has completed its internal paperwork.

Yet evidence we have gathered suggests that internal approvals, commissioning arrangements and administrative processes are determining when—and sometimes whether—children receive education and support the law says they are entitled to.

At Measure what Matters, we believe the problem goes far deeper than individual delay or poor administration. 

The evidence presented to us raises a serious question: 

Are Local Authorities now operating internal policies and working practices that are incompatible with their legal duties to children?

Meanwhile, children lose days, weeks and months of education. Trusted support is withdrawn. Opportunities are lost that cannot be recovered. The impact can be devastating. Parents spend the time they should have with their children endlessly chasing the public bodies which are legally responsible for supporting them. Many parents are forced to give up work. Entire families can collapse under the pressure this creates.

So, at the heart of this proposed challenge is one question: when the law says a council must secure a child’s provision, can its internal processes be allowed to determine whether and when that provision is actually delivered?

Complaints, Ombudsman findings, political pressure, media investigations and individual legal action have exposed unprecedented levels of serious failures and secured vital help. 

 Yet resolving one child’s case can leave the practices behind it untouched.

One child’s provision is temporarily restored. Another family starts the same fight. Those without the resources, capacity or strength to keep challenging are simply left behind. 

Families have long waited for an opportunity to bring their evidence together and start to challenge the very practices that keep forcing them back into battle. This campaign aims to make that possible.

Our sector-leading legal team will now scrutinise the detailed evidence we have gathered, to establish whether the policies and practices themselves are incompatible with the law and, if the grounds are established, pursue a systemic challenge through judicial review.

The aim is simple: lasting systemic change that reaches well beyond the families who bring the case.

Our legal team—and how you can help

Measure What Matters has now instructed Irwin Mitchell, with its substantial experience in public law, education and disability rights. Irwin Mitchell are instructing a counsel team led by Steve Broach KC, a nationally recognised public-law barrister with particular expertise in SEND and the rights of disabled children and young people.

We have already assembled detailed documentary evidence and accounts from affected families and providers. 

We now need to raise approximately £7,500 to fund the next two stages: 

Stage 1- Specialist legal investigation, confirmation of suitable lead claimants and; 

Stage 2- Preparation to move swiftly towards a formal pre-action challenge.

This legal team have undertaken to complete this vital work at substantially reduced rates, allowing a relatively modest fund to support an investigation with potentially far-reaching significance. These first stages will rigorously test the case and determine whether there are grounds on which it can proceed.

Please donate what you can and share this campaign. Together, you now have an opportunity to challenge the system that keeps leaving families to fight alone.

What’s happening – and why this legal challenge starts in Surrey

For children who cannot access suitable education in school, council-arranged provision can be their entire education. This includes children receiving Alternative Provision and those with Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS) arrangements. Others rely on independently commissioned teaching or therapies alongside their school placement, to ensure they can attend, at all.

These arrangements often depend on support from highly specialist providers and relationships built over months, sometimes, years.

However for many families this process is far from straightforward and they often face weeks, months and sometimes years where the education the law requires for their child is not being delivered by the Local Authority responsible for arranging it.

Families across England will recognise these failures. 

Among the 6 largest county councils, a search of recent published Local Government Ombudsman decisions returned 107 serious upheld complaints about Alternative Provision.

Of those, one Local Authority alone, Surrey County Council, accounted for 44- more than twice the number in any other council in the comparator group.

Then, in July 2026, providers approached us after being instructed by Surrey County Council not to continue educational and therapeutic provision beyond approved end dates, even while continuation decisions remained outstanding. Multiple families soon confirmed that their children’s educational provision had not been secured for the autumn term with just days to go before the summer break. 

Having assessed the situation, we issued formal briefings and warnings. MPs and councillors intervened. The media reported the issue extensively as the start of the new term approached. We escalated the issue directly to the Secretary of State for Education. Yet still, multiple families began the autumn term without confirmed or complete provision.

Details of some of the media coverage can be found here: Some Surrey SEND children face losing tuition in September - BBC News

Those experiences now sit alongside a substantial body of wider documentary evidence: council instructions, published audit findings and accounts from families and providers. Together, they provide a basis for investigating the connection between council processes and repeated, prolonged failures to deliver children’s provision.

The paperwork may call it “awaiting approval”. 

For a child, it can mean no teaching, no therapy and the loss of trusted relationships painstakingly built to make learning possible.

Why this matters beyond Surrey

We start in Surrey because we now have the evidence to build the proposed case. However the potential for meaningful change reaches right across England.

A successful challenge could require changes to the practices which repeatedly leave children without provision and establish legal principles with significance across England- giving families a stronger basis for holding councils to their duties, without having to fight the same battles child by child, term by term, year by year. 

We do not assume that every local authority operates the same processes. But this question of whether internal procedures can obstruct statutory entitlements matters wherever children depend on councils to secure their education is one which applies across England.

Public authorities have discretion over how they organise their services. They cannot organise away the law.

You do not need to live in Surrey, or have a child with special educational needs, to care whether public bodies honour their duties to children. This case matters to everyone who believes accountability should protect those least able to demand it.

How the case will proceed

Stage 1: Investigation and case building — initial target £3,750 (including VAT)

The first stage will fund focused work by Irwin Mitchell and the counsel team to:

• review the key policies, process documents and evidence;
• test whether the identified practices are arguably unlawful at a systemic level;
• refine the proposed grounds and remedy;
• identify suitable lead claimants whose live cases demonstrate the operation and impact of the challenged process;
• ensure the evidence covers the relevant range, potentially including EOTAS, Alternative Provision and commissioned Section F therapies or support; and
• prepare for rapid progression to the pre-action stage if the legal threshold is met.

Stage 2: Formal pre-action challenge – target £7,500 **

If Stage 1 confirms a viable case, the next step will be formal correspondence under the Judicial Review Pre-Action Protocol. We want to reach this point as quickly as responsible case preparation allows.

Why we need your help now

Children’s provision is missing, partial or precarious now. For providers, unresolved approvals and uncertainty over payment can mean being unable to retain specialist staff, reserve places or continue delivering support. Once that capacity is lost, issuing the paperwork may not bring it back.

Judicial review is acutely time-sensitive. As individual cases are resolved or circumstances change, the opportunity to bring the underlying practices before a court can narrow... even while other families continue to experience the same failures.

We therefore need to bring the evidence and suitable lead cases together and move to pre-action quickly. Every contribution will help fund the vital legal work needed to test the evidence and prepare a potential challenge.

Please donate if you can, and share this campaign with families, educators, providers, disability-rights supporters and anyone who believes that public bodies must be accountable to the law.

Children should not have to depend on their families’ capacity to fight, attract public attention or threaten legal action to receive provision that the law has already said must be secured. 

When the law says “must”, a public authority cannot treat it as “maybe”.

Who we are

Measure What Matters is a small, independent public-accountability initiative. We use open-source data, documentary evidence and testimony to examine the gap between what public services promise and what people experience.

Our work is evidence-led and non-party-political. Over the past year, we have gathered more than 2,000 accounts from families across England experiencing serious maladministration in the SEND System and taken that evidence directly to Parliament, the Department for Education and the national media.

Our strategy is simple: we bring evidence, analysis and lived experience together to identify where public services are falling short, and use public scrutiny, media engagement, political advocacy and legal action to secure accountability and the change communities need. For this proposed challenge, we have brought families and education providers together, documented recurring failures, examined the processes behind them and escalated our findings to those responsible. 

We are now placing that evidence before specialist lawyers to establish the basis for systemic legal action.

           Uncover. Inform. Empower.