Disclosure Log

EHC plans and Emotional Based School Avoidance (FOI/6146)

Message from Nottinghamshire County Council - 22 July 2025

Dear *****

Freedom of Information Request – Ref: FOI/00006146

Thank you for your email of 21 July 2025 where you requested:

My request relates to Emotional Based School Avoidance (EBSA) and Education Health and Care plans (EHC plans). I am looking for data relating to the number of times Emotional Based School Avoidance or EBSA is mentioned in EHC plans held by your council over the past seven years. Specifically, please could you provide the following:

For each of the academic years 18/19, 19/20, 20/21, 21/22, 22/23, 23/24, and 24/25, the total number of EHC plans held by your authority.
In each of the academic years 18/19, 19/20, 20/21, 21/22, 22/23, 23/24, and 24/25 the number of EHC plans held by your council at some point in that year which mention Emotional Based School Avoidance or EBSA”.

From our preliminary assessment, it is clear that we will not be able to answer your request without further clarification. Under section 1(3) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), a public authority need not comply with a request unless any further information reasonably required to locate the information is supplied. If a request is too broad or general in nature, then public authorities have a duty to provide advice and assistance to the applicant in order to focus the request.

In order to provide you with the information on the scale that you have requested would require us to manually review around 5,000 education and healthcare plans. This is because the term “emotional based school avoidance” is not something we can search the plans by; therefore an officer would need to manually read each plan that we have produced in the period requested to see if it covers your request. We estimate that it will take an officer 5 minutes to review each file and this would total around 417 hours of time.

Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which for local government is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

We estimate that it will take us in excess of 18 hours to determine appropriate material and locate, retrieve and extract the information in reference to your request. Therefore, your request will not be processed further.

You may wish to refine your request by narrowing its scope by being more specific about what information you particularly wish to obtain, including any dates or period of time relevant to the information required. In relation to your first question on the total number of EHCPs this information is already published by the Department for Education here https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/education-health-and-care-plans/2025.

Your privacy: we use your personal information such as name and address so that we can comply with our legal obligations to respond to FOI requests. For further details about the use of information about you, please see the information handling privacy notice on our website at https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/media/4323566/informationgovernanceandinformationrightsprivacynotice.pdf.

If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request, you have the right to ask for an internal review requests should be submitted within 40 working days of the date of receipt of the response to your original request and should be addressed to: Complaints and Information – Team Manager, Nottinghamshire County Council, County Hall, Loughborough Road, West Bridgford, NOTTINGHAM, NG2 7QP or [email protected].

Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.

If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, WILMSLOW, SK9 5AF or https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/foi-and-eir-complaints/.

Yours sincerely

Colin Sawers (He/Him)
Information Case Officer | Customers, Complaints and Information
Chief Executive"s Department | Nottinghamshire County Council
County Hall | Loughborough Road | West Bridgford | NOTTINGHAM | NG2 7QP
Tel: (0115) 977 3714