SEND tribunal appeals: who appeals, and who wins

When a council refuses to assess a child, refuses to issue a plan, or writes a plan that doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t secure the right support or the right school.

Most disagreements never become appeals. In the 2025 calendar year the Department for Education recorded an appeal rate of 6.6%: of the roughly 406,000 decisions a family could in principle have challenged, about one in fifteen was taken to tribunal. But the number doing so is climbing fast: appeals registered in 2025 were up 21.1% on the year before.

When families do appeal, the single biggest issue is the content of the plan itself.

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.

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 doesn’t mean an appeal is a formality. It means the decisions being appealed are very often wrong, and a tribunal is willing to say so.

Three in ten appeals end before the hearing

The 99% figure comes with an important piece of context: it describes the appeals a judge actually decided. Most appeals do go that far - about seven in ten recorded outcomes were tribunal decisions - but a significant minority are conceded by the council or settled first, once the council looks again at a case it is likely to lose.

In 2024/25 the tribunal recorded 20,000 outcomes. 71% of those, around 14,000, were 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 won’t add up exactly, but they show the shape of what happens.)

For a family, the practical lesson is that a strong appeal sometimes resolves the problem without a hearing - in roughly three in ten cases the council concedes or the case is withdrawn first - but prepare on the basis that yours will go all the way to a decision, because most do.

The pressure is showing in the wait. The number of open cases reached a new high of 17,000 in 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.

• 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, and remain the latest published academic-year outcome figures. 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 of 17,000 comes from a more recent Ministry of Justice release, Tribunal Statistics Quarterly: January to March 2026, for the full 2025/26 financial year; it is reported here as separate context rather than blended with the academic-year outcome figures above.

The appeal rate of 6.6% and the count of 26,977 appeals registered in 2025 are from the Department for Education’s Education, health and care plans, Reporting year 2026, 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 shape of the process rather than an exact running total. Data accessed July 2026.