SEND parents call for an independent judge lead inquiry into Surrey County Council's misconduct

Today over a hundred Surrey SEND families have given testimony to the Education Secretary, alongside Al Pinkerton MP and Chris Coghlan MP on gaslighting, lying and lawbreaking by Surrey County Council, wrecking children's lives. We are calling for an independent judge led investigation into misconduct at Surrey County Council to ensure this never happens again.

Read the full letter below: 

Read anonymised testimonies from parents and carers of young people with SEND: 

Fiona Davidson, Chair of the Children, Families, Lifelong Learning and Culture Select Committee supports the independent investigation into Surrey County Council's SEND provision service. 

She has called out the Council's narrative that their issues are simply reflective of the national picture, and suggests many failures are as a result of internal processes, procedures and attitudes. 

She states that her experience corroborates the poor performance identified by Liberal Democrat MPs in their 26th February letter to the Secretary of State (below).

In a letter in February to the Secretary of State, Bridget Phillipson MP, Surrey Lib Dem MPs raised appalling performance and governance failures by Surrey County Council including:

1. 1,809 Surrey children were out of school with special educational needs and disabilities SEND for over a third of the time in 2023/24, with devasting consequences for their life chances which Monica Harding MP raised with the Prime Minister.
2. County Council leader Tim Oliver directly mislead MPs in a formal written response over the disclosure of complaint volumes compared to other local authorities.
3. Surrey County Council did not disclose to its Council Scrutiny Committees for over 14 months that it had more breaches of statutory responsibilities relating to SEND children raised to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSO) than any other in the country
4. Appearing to reclassify complaints as “enquiries” to manipulate complaints volumes
5. A leadership culture contemptuous of families in crisis with Cllr Maureen Attewell dismissing on public record Surrey SEND parents as merely “articulate parents.”

The full letter is available below: