About SENguru

Who built this

SENguru is built by Chris Gilbert through SENguru CIC, a UK community interest company that owns and operates SENguru. It was started after Chris's own family went through the EHCP process and discovered first-hand how punishing it can be — even for someone who builds software for a living.

Why it exists

The Education, Health and Care Plan process is supposed to be a child-centred safety net. In practice it routinely behaves like an adversarial procurement exercise — long timetables, opaque thresholds, a wall of acronyms, and an industry of paid professionals on the other side of the table. Most parents only go through it once or twice in their lives. The local authority does it every day.

That asymmetry means the process tends to reward whoever has the time, the language, and the contacts to push back — not whoever has the most need. SENguru exists to empower parents to navigate an otherwise impossible process without having to become a part-time SEND solicitor.

Good faith — and what to do when it isn't there

Many schools and many local authority caseworkers genuinely engage in good faith, within the limits of overstretched budgets and impossible caseloads. SENguru is built to help those conversations go faster.

But there are well-documented patterns where engagement is not in good faith — refusals to assess on grounds the law doesn't permit, "advice" that nudges parents away from rights they actually have, draft plans with vague, unquantified provision that can be quietly downgraded later, and timetables that drift past statutory deadlines without explanation. SENguru calls those games out, gives parents the law and the wording to push back, and keeps a paper trail so the parent never has to argue a date from memory.

The aim is not to escalate every disagreement. It's to make sure parents can tell which it is, and respond appropriately.

How SENguru is funded

SENguru will always have a free tier. The features parents need to exercise statutory rights — the EHCP process map, deadlines, contact log, template letters, rights primer and timeline — stay free. Gating any of those during a deadline window would be a betrayal of the project's mission.

Some heavier features (AI-assisted draft-EHCP review, RAG-grounded chat across your case, multi-child cases, tribunal preparation tooling) are paid. Those are the bits that take real money to run, and pricing them sustainably is what keeps the free tier free for everyone else.

Pricing is set deliberately below the cost of an hour with a private SEND advocate. There is also a hardship route — registered carers and families on Universal Credit can request the paid tier free for six months, no justification needed. The commercials review is the source-of-truth for the current thinking.

What we will never do

• Sell or share your data with third parties for marketing or advertising.
• Run ads. SEND-adjacent advertisers are too often predatory, and we won't gamble with our users' trust.
• Paywall a feature a parent needs to exercise a statutory right inside a deadline window.
• Pretend to be a substitute for legal advice. SENguru is decision support — you make the calls.

Get in touch

Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are very welcome — see Where to start if you're new, or email hello@senguru.co.uk. For privacy or data-protection questions, see the Privacy Policy or email privacy@senguru.co.uk.