List of Special Schools

We understand that many parents using our site are seeking places for their children at independent or non-maintained special schools. Many parents sometimes also ask our advice on which schools would be the best for a child with a particular type of special educational need. As lawyers we are not in a position to give this type of advice.

However, we understand that looking for an appropriate school can often be a very time-consuming and arduous task for parents. We have therefore compiled a list of independent or non-maintained special schools registered with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) with some brief information on the type of education that they provide and giving their contact details. Where the school also has a website, we have created a link to their site. This will hopefully make life easier for parents when trying to compare them.

(Click here to find out the difference between an Independent and a Non-Maintained school)

The Department of Education's website also has information on schools which you can find here. If you are looking for an independent school specialising in Autistic Spectrum Disorder then you may wish to also visit the National Autistic Society website.

You can also search Edubase which is a register of all educational establishments in England and Wales, maintained by the DfES. It allows both the general public and government officials to access up to date information.

We used to provide two separate pages with lists of Independent Special Schools and Non-Maintained Special Schools. However, this proved to become a headache for us since we started to receive emails from other independent schools (or their website designers) asking us to update information about them or add them to the list if they were not already there. Whilst we had heard of some, others were new schools which we had no information about.

We have therefore decided it is fairer for us to now just provide a link to a download of a spreadsheet produced by the Government with a List of SEN independent schools and non-maintained special schools and say that any special schools which do not appear there or who wish to update their information should contact the Department for Education (or whatever it chooses to call itself at that time) to update the list.

Click here for a Glossary of terms related to Type of Establishment (from Edubase website)

Back To Top