When a council refuses to assess a child, refuses to issue a plan, or writes a plan that does not match what a child needs, a family has a right of appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, the body most people call the SEND tribunal. More families are using that right than ever before.
In the 2024/25 academic year, councils and families brought a record 25,000 appeals. And the headline that should give any worried parent pause for thought is this: of the appeals that reached a decision, almost all of them went the family’s way.
This report sets out what the official figures from the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education actually show about who appeals, what they appeal about, and what happens when they do.
Who ends up at tribunal, and why
An appeal does not come out of nowhere. It follows a decision a family disagrees with: a refusal to carry out an Education, Health and Care needs assessment, a refusal to issue a plan after assessing, or a final plan whose wording does not secure the right support or the right school.
Most disagreements never become appeals. In the 2024 calendar year the Department for Education recorded an appeal rate of 5.7%: of the roughly 365,000 decisions a family could in principle have challenged, about one in eighteen was taken to tribunal. But the number doing so is climbing fast: appeals registered in 2024 were up 42.7% on the year before.
When families do appeal, the single biggest issue is the content of the plan itself.
Ministry of Justice, Tribunal Statistics Quarterly (July to September 2025), SEN appeals, academic year 2024/25
Three in five appeals are about what the plan says: the description of a child’s needs, the support promised, and the school named. Around a quarter are against a council’s refusal to assess in the first place. The rest cover refusals to issue a plan, decisions to stop maintaining one, and other grounds.
You do not appeal because you are unhappy in general. You appeal a specific decision, and the law sets out which decisions carry a right of appeal. The content of a plan is appealable section by section, which is why plan-content appeals are the largest group.
What happens when families appeal
This is the figure that surprises people most.
Of the appeals that reached a tribunal decision in 2024/25, 99% were decided in favour of the person who brought the appeal, almost always the parent or young person. That is the same proportion as the year before. In plain terms, when a SEND disagreement is actually tested in front of a tribunal, the family is very likely to be right.
That does not mean an appeal is a formality. It means the decisions being appealed are very often wrong, and a tribunal is willing to say so.
Most appeals never reach a hearing
The 99% figure comes with an important piece of context: most appeals do not get as far as a decision at all. Many are conceded by the council or settled before the hearing, once the council looks again at a case it is likely to lose.
- Appeals registered in 2024/25
- 5,000 still working through the system Outcomes recorded in the same year
- 6,000 settled or withdrawn before a hearing Decided by the tribunal
Ministry of Justice, Tribunal Statistics Quarterly (July to September 2025), SEN appeals, academic year 2024/25
In 2024/25 the tribunal recorded 20,000 outcomes. Only 71% of those, around 14,000, were actually decided by a judge. The other 29%, roughly 6,000 cases, were settled or withdrawn before a hearing. (These are flows within a single year rather than one tracked group of cases, so they will not add up exactly, but they show the shape of what happens.)
For a family, the practical lesson is that lodging a strong appeal often resolves the problem without ever sitting in front of a tribunal panel, because a council that expects to lose will frequently concede first.
The pressure is showing in the wait. The number of open cases reached a new high of 15,000 in Q2 of the 2025/26 financial year, as appeals continue to arrive faster than the system can clear them. A strong case is worth a great deal, but it can take many months to be heard.
What this means if you are considering an appeal
The data points to three things worth holding onto.
Keep every decision letter and note its date. Most appeal rights run for a set time from the date of the decision, so the paperwork and the timing matter from day one.
- If your council has refused to assess your child, that is the second most common thing families appeal, and our guide on what to do when an assessment is refused walks through the next steps.
- If you disagree with a decision or a final plan, our guide to appealing an EHCP decision explains your rights and how to start.
- If you want to know what the process actually feels like, what to expect at a SEND tribunal covers it step by step, and preparing for tribunal with AI helps you get your evidence in order.
Methodology and sources
The appeal volumes and outcomes are from the Ministry of Justice’s official statistics release Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: July to September 2025, which reports SEN appeals on an academic-year basis (September to August). The 25,000 registered appeals, the 20,000 outcomes, the 71% decided by the tribunal, and the 99% decided in the appellant’s favour all come from that release for 2024/25. The prior-year comparison (21,000 appeals in 2023/24, up 55%) is from the equivalent July to September 2024 release. The open caseload figure is from the same source for the second quarter of the 2025/26 financial year.
The appeal rate of 5.7% and the count of 22,300 appeals registered in 2024 are from the Department for Education’s Education, health and care plans, Reporting year 2025, which counts on a calendar-year basis. Because the two sources use different reporting years, their headline totals differ; we have labelled which basis each figure uses rather than blending them. The funnel figures are annual flows, not a single cohort of cases followed through to the end, so the stages are illustrative of the journey rather than an exact running total. Data accessed June 2026.