The SEND Tribunal queue you’re joining is longer than it has ever been.
At the end of the 2025/26 financial year, 17,260 SEND tribunal cases were open and still waiting for an outcome. That’s according to tribunal statistics from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). It’s a record, and it isn’t close: the open caseload is up 43% on the year before, and 18.6 times the number waiting a decade earlier.
Our companion report on who wins at tribunal covers the appeal volumes and the 99% win rate once a case is decided.
Why the queue keeps growing
For England’s SEND Tribunal, officially the First-tier Tribunal (Special Educational Needs and Disability), MoJ publishes three numbers every quarter: how many appeals arrive (receipts), how many get cleared (disposals), and how many are still sitting open (the caseload). When more cases arrive than get cleared, the queue grows, and that’s exactly what has been happening.
In 2025/26, the tribunal recorded 29,446 new SEND appeals, its highest number on record and up 23% on the year before. Disposals hit a record too, 22,874, up 18%. But receipts still outran disposals by more than 6,500 cases, and that gap is why the backlog grew. MoJ’s own commentary puts it plainly: “receipts remain higher than disposals, resulting in a rise in open caseload.”
Ministry of Justice, Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: January to March 2026, Tables S_2-S_4
Open caseload has grown every single year since 2016/17. It took three years to roughly double, from 1,161 to 2,467 by 2019/20. In the six years after that, it grew more than six-fold, reaching 17,260 by the end of 2025/26. The queue is getting longer faster.
How long is “the queue”, really?
For three tribunals, MoJ actually tells you a mean number of weeks. In the quarter ending March 2026, the average case took 61 weeks at the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), 36 weeks for an Employment Tribunal claim, and 35 weeks at Social Security and Child Support. For the SEND Tribunal, that same average simply doesn’t exist. MoJ is direct about why, stating it measures mean time to clearance only “for those tribunals (FTTIAC, ET and SSCS) where we can measure” it. SEND isn’t one of them, in this release or the one before it.
We built the closest honest substitute from the figures MoJ does publish: take the open caseload at the end of each year, divide it by that year’s disposals, and turn the result into months.
This isn’t a per-case wait time. It’s a measure of how much clearance work is stacked up in the queue, assuming disposals kept going at the same pace and no further cases arrived. It’s the kind of “months of stock” figure used to describe any queue where demand outpaces supply.
Our calculation from Ministry of Justice, Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: January to March 2026
By that measure, the queue has grown from under four months’ worth of clearance work in 2016/17 to just over nine months’ worth in 2025/26.
A mean “time to disposal” and a wait for a hearing date aren’t the same thing. MoJ’s disposal figures include cases that end without a hearing at all, because the council conceded or the family withdrew, alongside the larger share that go all the way to a decision. Blending those together would understate what a fully-contested case actually takes. For what actually happens to a single case between registration and a hearing date, see what to expect at a SEND tribunal.
What a nine-month queue means for your child
A school year in England runs across three terms, autumn to summer, roughly the same length as the queue we just measured. Say a case joins the backlog at the start of a school year. The arithmetic says it could still be waiting in the summer term. Your child’s placement, support or plan stays unresolved the whole time.
That’s the real cost of a growing backlog. It’s a school year where the support your child needs is stuck behind a decision nobody has made yet, and a young person doesn’t get that year back.
A long tribunal queue is never a lawful reason to accept less support in the meantime. If a school or council tells you a reduced timetable or paused provision is just “while we wait for tribunal,” that’s worth challenging on its own terms. Our guide to when a reduced timetable is unlawful covers exactly this.
How to keep provision going while you wait
The legal duties that were already in place don’t pause just because a case is sitting in a queue. If your child has an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), the council still has to secure everything written in Section F of it, full stop, tribunal backlog or not. Our guide to what to do when an EHCP isn’t being delivered covers how to prove a gap and hold the council to the plan while your appeal works its way through the system.
A few other places to go from here, depending on where you are:
- If you’ve registered and want to know what actually happens next, what to expect at a SEND tribunal walks through every stage.
- If a hearing date has landed, preparing for tribunal with AI helps you get your bundle and your arguments in order.
- If you’re deciding whether an appeal is worth it at all, our companion report on who appeals and who wins covers the appeal volumes and outcomes once a case is decided.
Methodology and sources
The receipts, disposals and open caseload figures are from the Ministry of Justice’s Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: January to March 2026 (published 11 June 2026). They come from the “Special Educational Needs and Disability” column of Tables S_2, S_3 and S_4 in that release’s data tables. These tables report on a financial year basis (1 April to 31 March). That’s a different year basis to the academic year (1 September to 31 August) figures our companion report on who wins at tribunal uses for its appeal-volume and win-rate figures. The two “2024/25” totals genuinely differ: 23,861 receipts on a financial-year basis against 25,002 registered appeals on an academic-year basis, because they cover different 12-month windows of the same tribunal. Neither figure is wrong. This report keeps the two separate rather than blending them.
The 61, 36 and 35-week mean clearance times for the Immigration and Asylum, Employment, and Social Security and Child Support tribunals come from the same release’s Tables T_1 to T_3. So does the confirmation that no equivalent figure is published for SEND. We cross-checked that against an earlier quarterly release (July to September 2025) to confirm this isn’t a one-off gap.
The “months of clearance work in the queue” figures are our own calculation (open caseload at year-end divided by that year’s disposals, multiplied by 12), not an MoJ-published average wait. The full working, every source figure, and the extraction script are kept in our internal research records for this report. Data accessed 30 July 2026.