Advocacy Matters, But It Is Not Enough on Its Own
Advocacy plays a vital role for families navigating the Additional Learning Needs (ALN) system. Good advocacy protects rights, helps parents understand complex processes, and can be the difference between a child receiving appropriate support or being left to struggle without it.
After more than a decade working in advocacy, including supporting families through statutory processes and tribunals, I have seen firsthand how effective skilled, well-resourced advocacy can be. It remains an essential part of the system, and it always will.
However, since the lifting of lockdown restrictions, something has fundamentally changed.
Demand has outstripped supply
Across Wales, demand for advocacy has increased sharply. Families are facing longer waiting lists, advocates are carrying increasingly large caseloads, and many parents are now reaching advocacy services only once situations have already escalated into crisis.
This is not a failure of advocacy or advocates.
It is the predictable result of sustained system pressure. Delays and gaps across education, health and social care increasingly intersect and compound, with families often navigating all three systems at the same time. Services that once absorbed need earlier are now stretched, fragmented, or harder to access, and responsibility for navigating complexity has increasingly fallen to families themselves.
At the same time, much of the practical support once delivered directly by statutory services has shifted into the third sector. Voluntary and community organisations are now providing guidance, navigation and informal support at scale, often without the resourcing, capacity or infrastructure required to meet the volume and complexity of needs being presented.
Advocacy services, by their nature, are reactive and case-focused. They are now being asked to absorb levels of unmet need they were never designed to carry alone.
The gap advocacy alone cannot fill
Advocacy is necessarily intensive. It requires time, specialist knowledge, and close involvement in individual cases. This means it cannot easily provide:
early, low threshold guidance at scale
preventative reassurance before formal escalation
ongoing support for families who are not yet at crisis point
system navigation help without opening a full case
As a result, advocacy is increasingly being used as a last resort, rather than as one part of a layered support system.
Complexity does not affect families equally
System pressure does not land evenly.
Many families face additional barriers that make accessing support harder and slower. These include multilingualism, faith and cultural considerations, race, gender identity or sexual orientation, poverty, poor access to public transport, and a lack of accessible or welcoming venues.
For some families, simply attending appointments, understanding written guidance, or navigating digital systems requires significantly more effort. When services are overstretched and thresholds rise, these families are often the first to disengage or fall through gaps, not because they need less support, but because the system is harder for them to access.
This added complexity further increases demand on advocacy services, which are then asked to resolve issues that might otherwise have been prevented earlier.
Additional pressure points outside formal systems
Alongside pressures within statutory services, many families are increasingly turning to Elective Home Education communities for support following school breakdown, Emotionally Based School Avoidance, or unmet Additional Learning Needs.
Elective Home Education groups have historically provided peer connection, shared knowledge and informal reassurance for families choosing alternative education pathways. However, most Elective Home Education groups remain unregulated, volunteer-led spaces, run by parents who are also caring for their own families.
They were not designed to absorb the recent influx of children and young people with complex Additional Learning Needs profiles, Emotionally Based School Avoidance, trauma, or intersecting needs. As more families arrive in these spaces out of necessity rather than choice, unmet need is being displaced rather than resolved.
Parent volunteers are increasingly expected to hold significant emotional, practical and system navigation support roles without training, capacity, safeguarding structures or sustainable infrastructure. This creates strain for organisers and inconsistent experiences for families, particularly those already facing barriers related to language, poverty, disability or transport.
This does not reflect a failure of Elective Home Education communities. It reflects a system under sustained pressure, where families seek support wherever it is available when formal routes are slow, inaccessible or overwhelmed.
As a result, pressure that cannot be absorbed within schools, health services or Elective Home Education communities ultimately resurfaces within advocacy services, further increasing caseloads and reinforcing the cycle of crisis led support.
Why additional infrastructure matters
What is missing is a complementary layer of preventative, low threshold support that sits before formal casework advocacy and supports families earlier.
This kind of infrastructure can:
provide accessible information and reassurance before crisis
support families to navigate systems without immediately escalating to formal processes
reduce avoidable referrals into advocacy
ease pressure on already stretched services
allow advocates to focus on cases that genuinely require skilled representation
Digital guidance, peer led support and predictable community spaces all have a role to play here. They do not replace advocacy. They protect it, by reducing unnecessary escalation and supporting families earlier in their journey.
A system needs more than one lever
Advocacy will always have a place. There will always be cases where skilled representation and formal challenge are necessary, and advocacy services remain a vital safeguard for families.
But a sustainable ALN system cannot rely on casework alone. It needs multiple layers working together. Preventative information, accessible digital support, peer led spaces, community infrastructure and advocacy must operate alongside one another, each doing what it is best designed to do.
Contributing to the wider conversation
Welsh Government is currently running a short consultation seeking feedback from parents and carers on the provision of ALN advocacy.
If you have experience of advocacy, whether as a parent, carer or advocate, it is worth contributing your perspective to help inform future approaches.
Constructive feedback from those directly affected is an important part of shaping systems that genuinely work for families.
Looking ahead
We will continue to focus on building preventative, accessible support alongside, not instead of, existing advocacy services, because families deserve a system that supports them before they reach breaking point.
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