Hackney Council has been ordered to pay £4,500 in compensation to the family of an autistic boy who missed months of education because of the local authority’s delays and errors. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) found that the council’s failure to arrange alternative education promptly caused the child and his family “avoidable distress”.
Background and initial delays
The boy, identified only as Y, was diagnosed with autism in March 2023 and had been out of school for a “significant” period. His father, Mr X, requested an Education, Health and Care (EHC) needs assessment from Hackney Council in July 2024. Although the council was aware that Y was not attending school, it took several months to consider whether it needed to arrange alternative education—a breach of its legal duty under the Education Act 1996.
Under the law, local councils must support children who are not being educated at school, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or those who have been excluded. If a child has an EHC Plan, the council has an ongoing duty to arrange the funded support it guarantees.
Ombudsman’s findings and impact
Parents who request an EHC assessment must be told within six weeks whether the council has agreed to assess, and the plan itself must be completed within 20 weeks of the request. Hackney met this deadline for Y’s EHC Plan, but it failed to include the agreed “Education Other Than At School” (EOTAS) package until January 2025, despite Mr X requesting it earlier than November 2024.
The LGSCO ruled that the council “conflated” Mr X’s request for EOTAS with its own duty to provide alternative education. As a result, Y lost out on roughly a school term’s worth of teaching. Even after the entitlement to funded tuition was agreed, he spent another half term without teaching because the council’s £75 per hour budget made it difficult to find “suitable” tutors. The watchdog described this as “service failure by the council”.
Council’s response and compensation
After Mr X complained, the council missed its own Stage 1 deadline to respond by two months, apologising and offering £200 for the “time and trouble and distress and inconvenience”. However, the Ombudsman found this insufficient, recommending a total payment of £4,500—£3,000 for the delay in incorporating alternative education into the EHC Plan and £1,500 for the failure to deliver tuition.
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.”
The spokesperson added: “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.”
