1. Please provide a list of all safeguarding referrals (typically known as section 47 referrals) relating to alleged abuse or neglect in nurseries for each year. Please provide the following break down for each one:
a) Year
b) Nature of abuse i.e. neglect/ physical abuse/ sexual abuse
c) Brief description of allegation i.e. child was struck on the head by staff member recorded on CCTV
d) Whether there was a LADO referral or not
e) Outcome of investigation into incident (make clear who carried it out): i.e. substantiated
f) Whether there was a complex abuse investigation (typically carried out by the local authority and police)
2. Please provide the highest number of allegations received in total in relation to an individual nursery over the entire period and detail how many were substantiated over the entire period (i.e. not year by year).
For questions 1 and 2, compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. Unfortunately we don’t record referrals in a way that we would be able to specifically pick out those that are from a nursery setting without a manual check of each referral. The number of referrals for the last 5 years was 27,807 which at 10 minutes per file will well exceed the 18 hours.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held, this is not possible for this request.