The Quiet Divide: How the SEND System Turns Parents and Schools into Opponents

Most families enter the SEND system long before the local authority ever appears. It usually begins with a child who is struggling and a parent who is trying, repeatedly, to be heard. By this stage, parents are rarely hopeful. They arrive already carrying months or years of effort and exhaustion - the meetings, the diary notes, the instinctive worry, the sense that something important is being missed…

They have often already encountered minimisation or dismissal. They have been told to “wait and see,” reassured that “all children struggle sometimes,” or encouraged to try behaviour charts, stricter routines, or even a parenting course - as though the difficulty lies in the home rather than in a child whose needs are not being met.

These responses are often subtle but cumulative. They introduce doubt where certainty once lived. They plant the idea that the problem is parenting rather than provision, and they mark the first wound in a much longer process.

So when concerns escalate and the school becomes evasive, defensive, or rigid, the frustration that surfaces is entirely understandable. Schools are where the law places responsibility for early identification and support. Parents know this. They do not come expecting perfection, but they do expect honesty, openness, and best endeavours.

When the opposite happens, the sense of being let down is sharp and deeply felt. Many families begin the SEND journey believing that the school is the primary obstacle because, for a time, it genuinely appears that way.

It is usually only later - when the local authority becomes involved - that the system reveals its second layer. Families who have been dismissed or blamed by schools often find themselves hearing the same language from the LA - not enough evidence, not the right evidence, not “severe” enough, not the right timing. Another review. Another delay. Another implication that the concerns reflect the parent rather than the child. The repetition is uncanny, the tone is familiar - and so, very naturally, parents conclude that the school and the LA must be aligned in their resistance.

What families cannot see from where they stand is that schools are experiencing a parallel - and often more coercive - version of the same dynamic. Over time, in the cases I have supported and in the work I’ve witnessed more broadly, the relationship between schools and local authorities reveals itself to be remarkably similar to what parents experience - the minimisation, the doubt, the pressure to try everything except the thing that costs money. But it goes further. Schools are routinely discouraged from requesting additional funding. They are told to “use their £6,000 notional budget,” despite the fact that this is not a real, child-specific allocation. They are criticised for identifying too many pupils with SEND. Requests for support are knocked back. Needs are downplayed. The LA, which holds the purse strings, responds with the same delay, deny, deflect pattern that parents encounter, but with far greater power imbalance.

The result is that schools often behave like organisations under pressure - defensive, fearful, and cautious. This does not excuse poor practice or harmful decisions - families live the consequences of those decisions and they matter deeply - but it does give context. When a system exerts pressure from above, that pressure travels downward. The tone the LA sets becomes the tone the school absorbs, and too often, the tone the parent eventually receives. It is not intentional harm - it is systemic inheritance.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the now legendary confusion around the so called “£6,000 notional budget.” Parents are told the school “receives £6,000” for their child, schools insist that they don’t. Both positions feel true from the vantage point of the person saying them. The Department for Education’s own guidance clarifies the reality:

“The notional SEN budget is not a budget that is separate from the school’s overall budget… and is not intended to provide £6,000 for every pupil with SEN.”

The £6,000 notional budget is a fiction with real world consequences. It is not a grant, not a ring-fenced sum, and not something that arrives per child. It is simply an internal assumption about how much of the school’s existing budget should be used before the LA contributes anything further. But because the system communicates this so poorly, parents often believe schools are withholding money, and schools believe parents misunderstand their constraints. The confusion is not accidental, it is built into the structure.

This misunderstanding, repeated nationwide, has damaged countless relationships between families and schools. And it reinforces a dynamic that serves the system remarkably well. When parents blame schools, the LA quietly steps back. When schools become defensive with parents, the focus shifts sideways rather than upwards. While families and schools try to navigate their increasingly strained relationship, the system itself avoids scrutiny. The people with the least control are positioned as the problem, and the people with the most control remain largely invisible.

None of this removes responsibility from schools. Children deserve support, and when schools fail to act, the consequences can be profound. But accountability must sit where the power sits. And power, in SEND, sits overwhelmingly with the local authorities - the gatekeepers of funding, the interpreters of law, the bodies deciding who receives what - and above them, with central government, which designs the funding structures, sets the national policy direction, and ultimately dictates the level of scarcity in which the entire system operates. If you follow the chain upwards, the picture becomes clearer. Schools implement decisions they did not make, LAs ration resources they did not design - the root of the problem lies far beyond the school gates.

Parents and schools are frequently cast as opponents, each believing the other is the obstacle. But in reality, both are grappling with a system that minimises need, restrains resources, and relies on confusion to deflect responsibility. Parents experience the front facing version of this harm; schools experience the internal version. Both carry its weight; both absorb its consequences -and both are positioned to absorb blame for failures that originate elsewhere.

If we want meaningful reform in SEND - not cosmetic change, but structural reform that protects children and restores trust - we have to stop aiming our frustration sideways. The remedy begins with clarity - a recognition that parents and schools are not on opposite sides of anything meaningful, but rather two groups being shaped by the same scarcity, the same pressure, and the same systemic design.

The moment families and schools stop being pitted against each other - the moment they begin to understand the dynamics that shape their interactions and direct their efforts upwards, toward the source of the problem - is the moment the system’s favourite strategy begins to fail, and that is where real change finally becomes possible.