LVN, R (on the application of) v London Borough of Southwark

Facts

The claimant, LVN, is a 16-year-old child with special educational needs, acting by her grandmother as litigation friend. The defendant, the London Borough of Southwark, is her local education authority and maintains an Education, Health and Care Plan for her which names the interested party, Evolve Academy, as her education provider without specifying a site. She attended the academy's West Norwood site until December 2025, when the academy told the authority that the placement had broken down following concerns about her behaviour, including peer exploitation and intimidation, and refused to admit her from January 2026. The authority offered education at the academy's Kennington site, first as interim supervised tuition and, from 9 February 2026, full-time; the claimant refused, saying Kennington was unsafe because of a June 2025 incident on a bus in Peckham in which she was threatened by a person she believed connected to a gang operating in Kennington. She also declined to consider non-school tuition, and received no formal education after January 2026 apart from attending West Norwood to sit her GCSEs. She sought judicial review, claiming declarations for breach of section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014 and section 19 of the Education Act 1996, and a declaration and damages for breach of Article 2 of the First Protocol to the ECHR. Permission was granted at a renewed hearing.