Disclosure Log
Admittance into Reception Year of Summer-born Children Outside of Normal Age Group (FOI/6467)
Message from Nottinghamshire County Council - 02 October 2025
Dear ***** ********,
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – REQUEST FOR INFORMATION REFERENCE FOI/6467
Thank you for your request for information relating to Admittance into Reception Year of Summer-born Children Outside of Normal Age Group.
1. How many requests were made in each academic year by parents of summer-born children (i.e., children born between 1 April and 31 August) for delayed admission to Reception, meaning admission to Reception in the September following the child’s fifth birthday
2. For these requests, how many were:
A) Accepted by Nottinghamshire County Council.
B) Refused by Nottinghamshire County Council.
3. Please provide a total breakdown (across all five years combined) of the above data (applications, agreements, and refusals) by individual primary school participating in Nottinghamshire County Council"s Delayed Entry Scheme. I understand that the number of cases for some schools may be very low. If so, please either:
- Record the number as <5", or
- Omit the data for those schools and instead include them within a combined anonymised group total.
I can confirm that the Council holds this information, however it is not recorded centrally in a way that would allow us to readily extract it and it would require a manual search of individual records to identify the detail you have requested.
You may be aware that there is a statutory limit to the amount of time authorities are required to spend retrieving and collating information to respond to a request. This is defined in the Fees and Appropriate Limit Regulations and currently stands at 2.5 days or 18 hours.
Unfortunately, we do not record this information in a way that is automatically retrievable. Therefore, the Council is exempt from providing this information under s12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on the grounds that to do so would exceed the cost limit of £450. There are over 10,000 records per year to examine and even if it took only 1 minute per record (a very conservative estimate) to find and extract the information this would mean spending over 166 hours on this task. At a cost of £25 per hour (as set out in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004) this would amount to over £4,166 for each year of records. Given the number of records per year it is difficult to advise how you might narrow the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limit. You could ask for a small, random sample of records to be examined, but there would be no guarantee that this method would capture any deferral applications; alternatively, you could request information in relation to a particular school or small set of schools.
I am sorry that I cannot be more helpful.
You have the right to ask us to review this decision. If you wish to do so or you are unhappy about the way your request was handled, then please email and we will be happy to review your request.
For future reference, Nottinghamshire County Council regularly publishes previous FOI requests and answers on its website, under Disclosure logs, that may provide details relating to your query. (see link) Yours sincerely
Complaints and Information Team
Nottinghamshire County Council
The Council is committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring all personal information is kept confidential and safe. For more details see our general and service specific privacy notices at: https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/global-content/privacy