Disclosure Log

SEND deregistrations (FOI/5934)

Message from Nottinghamshire County Council - 27 June 2025

Dear *****

Freedom of Information Request – Ref: FOI/00005934

Thank you for your email of 4 June 2025 where you requested:
 
  1. The total number of children of typical primary school/secondary school/sixth form/college age (4-18) at either a state-funded mainstream school or a state-funded Special Educational Needs school with either 1) an active EHCP with your council, or 2) awaiting the outcome of an EHCP needs assessment from your council, as on:
    • 31st December 2020
    • 31st December 2021
    • 31st December 2022
    • 31st December 2023
    • 31st December 2024
    • Please provide an overall figure for each date, and then break this down into separate figures for "children with an active EHCP" AND "children awaiting the outcome of an EHCP needs assessment" for each date

2) The total number of children of typical primary school/secondary school/sixth form/college age (4-18) that attended either a state-funded mainstream school or a state-funded Special Educational Needs school that either 1) formerly had an active EHCP with your council, or 2) were awaiting the outcome of an EHCP needs assessment from your council, that were permanently deregistered from formal education between the following dates:
    • 1st January - 31st December 2020
    • 1st January - 31st December 2021
    • 1st January - 31st December 2022
    • 1st January - 31st December 2023
    • 1st January - 31st December 2024
    • Please provide the total figure per year, and then break this down into separate figures for "children who formerly had an active EHCP" AND "children who were awaiting the outcome of an EHCP needs assessment"

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 just for 2024 to manually review 1,708 records to see if a child was awaiting the outcome of an EHCP assessment that had been permanently deregistered from formal education.  We estimate that it would take 5 minutes to review each record and therefore a total of 142 hours for this one year of this part question.

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.  Within the time limit we are likely to be able to provide the number of children who formerly had an active EHCP that were electively home educated.  In relation to question 1 the Department for Education publish data from the SEN2 statistical return which answers this question.  The latest data for 2024 is published here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/education-health-and-care-plans/2024.

Information on the number of children with an EHCP, broken down by educational establishment type (to meet part 1 of Q1) is included in the file named sen2_estab_caseload.csv.  This includes data for all LAs from 2010 to 2024.  Data on the number of children still being assessed, or where the assessment has been completed but no decision has yet been taken as to whether to issue an EHCP (to meet part 2 of Q1) is included in filename sen2_mi.csv.  This includes data for all LAs from 2014 to 2024.  We are not able to break this down by establishment type as this is recorded as part of the assessment process.

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