Why we campaign

Improving best practice for all children with SEN

IPSEA’s purpose is to promote and advance the education of children and young people.

It does this primarily through providing one-to-one help to parents in individual cases involving children with SEN and/or disability.

IPSEA also works actively to influence improvements in overall policy and practice at both Local Authority (LA) and central government level regarding provision for all children with SEN and/or disability, and this web page describes that work.

Local authorities

At local level, our policy work’s main focus is to identify and seek to correct unlawful policy and practice within Local Authorities using evidence from our casework or supplied by concerned residents within those Local Authorities.

In particular we action a regular flow of formal complaints about the following aspects of how LAs handle their legal obligations:

• Criteria for statutory assessment of SEN
• Description of provision to be made through statements of special educational needs (i.e. not quantifying and specifying the help children need)
• Delegated funding schemes through which LAs seek to reduce or avoid their legal duties to assess, statement and arrange provision through statements (see current campaigns)

National government: law and policy on SEN and disability

When appropriate to IPSEA’s purpose, IPSEA seeks to intervene at national level to influence developments in SEN law and practice, particularly regarding the law and procedure relating to SEN statements. Examples have been:

• The rule that all statements must be amended by 15 February before a child transfers to a more senior school was proposed by IPSEA and accepted by Government.
• IPSEA campaigned successfully to prevent dilution of the obligation to specify the extra help a child needs in Part 3 of Statements in the revised SEN Code of Practice prior to its implementation in 2002. When this issue re-emerged through the wording of the SEN Toolkit, IPSEA brought a test case to obtain confirmation from the Court of Appeal that a statement clearly has to spell out the provision appropriate to meet the particular needs of the individual child (R (ota Ipsea Ltd) v Secretary of State for Education and Skills [2003] EWCA CIV 07 [2003] ELR 393).