Council delays left autistic boy without teaching for months

An autistic boy who missed months of education due to Hackney Council’s delays and mistakes has been awarded £4,500 in compensation.

The boy, known only as Y, received an autism diagnosis in March 2023 but had not gone to school for a “significant” amount of time. His father, Mr X, requested that Hackney Council undertake an education, health and care (EHC) needs assessment in July the following year.

Even though the council was aware at this point that Y had been out of school, it took several months to consider whether it needed to arrange alternative education for the boy – a dereliction of its legal duty under the Education Act 1996.

The law mandates that local councils should support children who are not being educated at school, such as those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or who have been excluded. If a child has an EHC plan entitling them to funded support, local authorities have an ongoing duty to arrange the guaranteed help.

Parents or carers who ask their councils to carry out an EHC assessment for a child or young person must be told within six weeks whether or not the council has agreed to assess, and the creation of the plan itself must take no more than 20 weeks from the date it was requested.

Hackney met this deadline for completing the boy’s EHC plan, but failed to include the agreed “education other than at school” (EOTAS) package until January 2025, despite Mr X requesting it before November.

Conflated

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman judged that during the process, which ran on for months, the council “conflated” the father’s request for EOTAS with its own duty to provide alternative education. As a result, the boy lost out on roughly a school term’s worth of teaching.

Even after the boy’s entitlement to funded tuition was agreed, he spent another half of a term without any teaching because the council’s £75-an-hour budget had made sourcing “suitable” tutors difficult.

“This is service failure by the council,” the watchdog ruled.

After Mr X later complained to the council, it missed its own stage 1 deadline to respond within two months, for which it apologised and offered the family £200 to recognise the “time and trouble and distress and inconvenience”.

But this was far from enough for the Ombudsman, which found the council’s delays over the out-of-school education package caused the child and his family “avoidable distress”.

The watchdog recommended the council apologise and pay a total of £4,500 – made up of £3,000 for the delay in incorporating alternative education provision into his EHC plan, and £1,500 for the failure to deliver tuition.

New systems

A council spokesperson said: “We recognise the failings outlined in the Ombudsman’s report and are very sorry for the distress caused to the child and their family. We are implementing new systems to identify children missing school due to illness, absence, exclusion and suspension earlier, and will ensure the Ombudsman’s findings are reflected in these changes.

“This will include better engagement with schools and families to resolve issues so that children can continue to attend their current school, and a new inclusion panel to provide better oversight of children not attending school.

“In recent months we have implemented a complaints handling improvement plan including staff training and better tracking. Together, these have created additional investigation capacity and generally helped resolve complaints earlier.”