Please provide the following data regarding children for whom your Local Education Authority has issued or maintained the Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans in 2022-2024:
1. Number of parental requests (aka expressed preference) for a specialist school placement made under Section 38(3) of the Children and Families Act (CFA) 2014, broken down by the year and the child’s ethnicity.
2. Number of cases, where a specialist school was named in section I of EHC plans, in response to such requests/ expressions of preference, broken down by the year and the child’s ethnicity.
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. We do not collate information relating to if a request for a school is due to a parental request. 3000-4000 consults are competed each year and it would take up to 10 minutes to determine if each request was due to parental preference and therefore this would exceed 600 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.