Special Needs Jungle Briefing
Special Needs Jungle MP Briefing
Parent-led advocacy group Special Needs Jungle helps families navigate getting the educational support children with special educational needs and disabilities are entitled to. Which can be a hostile and challenging process.
Special Needs Jungle joined Reclaim Rights for Children to write a joint briefing advising MPs on how they could support constituents struggling with the consequences of the Bill.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is approaching the final stages of its passage through parliament, and while its stated aims focus on improving safeguarding and children’s wellbeing, the mechanisms it introduces will profoundly change the relationship between families, schools, and the state.
The Context: Why SEND Families Are Particularly Vulnerable Parents of children with SEND do not typically turn to home education lightly.
Many do so only after years of unmet need, school-based trauma, or deteriorating mental health. For some children, home education is the only environment in which they can feel safe enough to learn.
The Bill introduces new systems of registration, monitoring, mandatory data sharing, and oversight — but without corresponding duties to provide meaningful support. This risks turning what should be a supportive education and wellbeing framework into a compliance driven system that increases pressure on the very families who already feel most marginalised. These are the constituents MPs will hear from most: families desperate to get through the week, who fear the consequences of being misunderstood or misjudged by services that often lack specialist SEND knowledge.
“These changes are likely to have especially serious
consequences for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), their parents, and families who home educate because mainstream schooling has been unable to meet their child’s needs.”
Briefing for MPs
Special Needs Jungle & Reclaim Rights for Children,
1. Loss of Parental Primacy and the Risk of Coerced Education
One of the most significant shifts in the Bill is the requirement for local authorities to give consent before certain children — including those attending special schools — can be withdrawn for home education.
Many SEND families already have a difficult relationship with local authorities, often characterised by battles to secure provision, disagreements about need, and a lack of trust.
Requiring LA consent to withdraw a child from school places enormous power in the hands of authorities whose decisions may be shaped by resource constraints rather than the individual child’s best interests.
For children whose mental health has deteriorated due to unmet needs in school, this clause risks trapping them in environments that could be actively harmful. Parents, who know their child’s needs most intimately, would see their decision-making powers effectively downgraded.
MPs can play a crucial role in pressing government to ensure that parental expertise is respected, and that SEND families
are not forced into adversarial processes simply for trying
to protect their children.
2. Home Visits and the Fear of Intrusion
The Bill enables local authorities to request home visits to assess the education being provided, even where there is no safeguarding concern.
For some children with disabilities — particularly those with anxiety, sensory needs, trauma histories or demand-avoidant profiles — the prospect of an unfamiliar official entering their
home can be deeply distressing. Parents worry that a child’s natural coping responses (such as hiding, refusing to engage, or shutting down) could be misinterpreted as evidence of neglect or inadequate education.
Compounding this is the unequal power dynamic: refusal of a home visit may trigger enforcement action or a school attendance order. The result is a situation where consent cannot be considered meaningful.
MPs could raise important questions about how these visits will be conducted, whether specialist SEND training will be mandatory for visiting officers, and how families will be
protected from misinterpretations or misjudgments.
3. Expansive Data Sharing and the Risk of Long-Term Surveillance
The Bill’s provisions on mandatory data sharing — particularly the creation of a unique
identifier for each child, along with wide powers allowing local authorities to store and share “any information they consider appropriate” about children not in school — raise serious concerns about privacy, consent, and the long-term consequences of being flagged as a child “of concern.”
SEND families are disproportionately entangled in safeguarding systems, often because unmet educational or therapeutic needs are misinterpreted as parental failings. Increased data sharing may amplify this risk rather than mitigate it.
There is well-documented evidence that predictive or risk-based data systems tend to over identify disadvantaged families, creating cycles of investigation rather than support. Families frequently report that once they are in “the system,” it is extremely difficult to escape scrutiny, regardless of whether any welfare concerns exist.
MPs are well placed to ask the government how these systems will be made transparent, what data will be stored, who will access it, how long it will be retained, and how families can challenge inaccuracies.
“SEND families are disproportionately entangled in safeguarding systems, often because unmet educational or therapeutic needs are misinterpreted as parental failings. Increased data sharing may amplify this risk rather than mitigate it.”
Briefing for MPs
Special Needs Jungle & Reclaim Rights for Children,
4. A Narrow and Potentially Inflexible Concept of “Suitable Education”
Many children with SEND do not thrive under the traditional, school-centred model of education. Their learning may be irregular, interest-led, project-based, or delivered in short,
manageable bursts. Parents and specialists often develop highly individualised approaches that simply do not resemble a conventional timetable.
The Bill requires parents to report how education is delivered, but without clear guidance that recognises the diversity of SEND learning pathways. Families fear that local authorities may apply overly rigid criteria, causing valid educational models to be judged as “unsuitable.” In such cases, parents could be forced to return their child to school, even when that school setting is the source of distress or regression.
MPs could provide a crucial voice in urging the government to issue detailed, SEND-informed statutory guidance that protects flexible, child-led approaches rather than eroding them.
5. Increased Administrative Pressure on Families Already at Breaking Point
The reporting duties and new registration requirements may seem reasonable on paper but can be overwhelming for parents who are already managing multiple appointments, therapies, diagnoses, and daily support needs.
There is also concern that community groups, clubs, or learning collectives — which many home-educated SEND children rely on — may withdraw services due to fears about new regulatory obligations. This could leave families increasingly isolated.
MPs will likely hear from constituents struggling under these new administrative burdens and should be prepared to challenge excessive or unnecessary bureaucratic requirements.
What MPs Can Do
Raise parliamentary questions about safeguards, clarity
of definitions, and the impact on disabled children and
their families.
Seek assurances that home visits will be carried out sensitively, by specialists trained in SEND and
trauma-informed practice.
Push for transparency around the new data sharing
powers, to ensure children’s rights to privacy and family life
are not undermined.
Work closely with local authorities, encouraging them to adopt supportive rather than punitive approaches when the
Bill comes into force.
“Advocate for guidance that recognises and respects alternative educational approaches, especially those used
for children with complex needs.”
“Engage directly with SEND families in the constituency, many of whom have expertise shaped through lived
experience and can offer valuable
insight into how these reforms will
work in practice.”
Much bigger threat than just education
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools legislation is written so broadly, we cannot know for sure of its future impact. We must reject these sweeping powers. Even if this legislation were to apply only to the direct care of children, there would still be privacy concerns for them and their families. But there is nothing in the legislation to limit it to this, and more widely, there is nothing about the direction of travel of the government that’s reassuring.
We have no control over how data about us is interpreted, or the inferences that can be drawn from it. For example:
- Autistic children have been profiled as being susceptible to ‘radicalisation’. Ofsted training, flagging this as a “risk factor” is leading to increasing numbers of autistic children targeted under counterterrorism powers for non-criminal behaviour or viewpoints.
- The profiling of children with SEND as being at higher risk of abuse, in part because of misunderstood research, has led to SEND being an accepted ‘risk factor’. As a result, parents have been investigated when they ask for help, something that is deeply traumatic for both the child and the parents, and high rates of accusations of Fabricated or Induced Illness.
- School absence, interpreted as an issue about individuals as opposed to a systemic problem, has resulted in increasingly intrusive interventions such as parenting courses, fines, and punishment. Absence itself is used as a ‘flag’ for potential abuse.
- The Troubled Families Oldham case study into sharing health data “long list” of desired data, even included women’s smear test status. When misused to draw negative inferences, it’s a further injustice to SEND parents who often put their own health aside to care and fight for their child’s support. Those with more “alternative” views on health or children’s development would also be flagged, as they are under vaccination data sharing.
“The Bill also has a woeful lack of detail or safeguards. As with ECHPs, we are being asked to accept the removal of rights in return for “assurances”.”
“When children’s struggles are recorded as “bad behaviour”, it can influence how different organisations interact with them and impact their life chances.”