Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of investing in early dispute resolution and mediation for the purposes of resolving disputes in the SEND system.

The department believes that more special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) disputes should be resolved earlier, with families, settings and local authorities working together to develop solutions to disagreements.

We are aware that not all families are able to access high quality, earlier dispute resolution through either local authority-commission mediation or disagreement resolution services. We are considering what more we can do to strengthen earlier dispute resolution and will set out our vision for redress in a reformed SEND system shortly.