A gap parents described
Parents and caregivers of children with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND, described local mental-health support as falling short of what their families needed in a study of people living in and around York, England. In an online survey, 68% said support was insufficient and 75% rated local availability as Poor or Very Poor. None of the 12 interview participants said current services met their needs.
The percentages describe the people who answered this survey, not all parents of children with SEND. Recruitment used opportunity and snowball sampling through schools, charities, social media, parenting groups and flyers. The authors caution that the place-based design limits how readily the findings transfer elsewhere, while participation bias may have excluded parents with the greatest support needs or overrepresented people dissatisfied with services. The direction of that possible bias is unknown.
The work of finding help
Participants described family life as layered and complex. They spoke about diverse child needs and connected those experiences with strain on parental mental health. The accounts did not quantify how common particular difficulties were or show that one experience caused another.
Parents described the route to support for their child as extremely long, complicated and paperwork-heavy. Families said they were expected to compensate when services were missing or ineffective, making parents responsible for work that formal support had not covered.
When formal provision was insufficient or inappropriate, participants often relied on informal networks and charities. Some experienced services as ineffective or harmful. Because these findings came from qualitative accounts, they do not establish how widespread those experiences were.
How the study gathered its evidence
The research used a mixed-methods exploratory design, combining an online survey with quantitative ratings, open-ended responses and follow-up semi-structured interviews. The survey included 66 respondents, while the interviews included 12 participants.
Researchers summarized the survey's demographic and Likert responses descriptively. They used reflexive thematic analysis, a way of identifying patterns in written and spoken accounts, for the open-ended survey responses and interview transcripts. Survey and interview data were coded separately, then mapped together and refined into shared themes. The analysis was pre-registered on OSF.
The study had university ethics approval and written informed consent was obtained. Participants were also given links to support groups in case discussing their experiences was distressing.
Support for the whole family
Participants called for integrated, strengths-based and family-centred support, with flexible parallel provision for parents and children. Here, parallel provision means support arranged for parents and children alongside each other, so parental well-being is addressed as part of family support rather than left to families to coordinate across disconnected services.
The proposed service approach was not tested. The study therefore cannot show whether integrated, flexible family support would improve parental mental-health outcomes, or whether it would be acceptable or cost-effective.
What the study cannot answer
Nor does the research estimate the prevalence of mental-health problems among parents. It reports self-described experiences and perceptions, and its qualitative themes are not estimates of prevalence or treatment effects.
The strongest conclusion is narrower: in this York-area sample, parents described support as hard to find, hard to navigate and sometimes damaging, and asked for services designed around whole-family needs. Whether that pattern holds in other regions remains uncertain because the authors say the place-based design limits transferability and participation bias may have shaped who took part.
Paper data and sources
Original title: Experiences of mental health support services in a community sample of parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities.
Authors: Astrid Erica June Bowen, Laura Fox
Journal/Repository: PLOS mental health
Status: Peer-reviewed
First online: 2026-08-21
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000695
Original paper · Full text