£2.4 billion a year — what councils' own SEND data reveals

We sent Freedom of Information requests to all 152 English local authorities asking for the SEND figures they don't normally publish — Tribunal concession rates, EP advice timeliness, complaint outcomes, and full cost breakdowns including Tribunal legal spend, independent-placement costs, and average cost per EHCP.

What came back is the clearest picture yet of how much money the SEND system spends fighting parents, and how much it spends placing children at independent specialist schools because local provision can't cope. The browser below has every responding council's own numbers — pick yours, see what they look like.

The hidden cost — Tribunal-forced placements

The biggest cost councils don't publish is what they end up funding under Tribunal pressure. Walsall conceded 41 independent-placement requests at Tribunal in 2025 alone, with the Tribunal directly ordering 3 more. At ~£55,000–£70,000 per placement, that is roughly £2.2m–£2.9m of new annual placement cost for one council, in one year — placements obtained only after parents fought their case. Walsall's own decision-making produced very few new placements in the same period.

If Walsall's concession rate is representative across England's 152 LAs, the national figure for Tribunal-driven independent-placement spend is in the order of £300 million a year. We treat this as an upper-bound estimate from one council's pattern (Walsall is likely at the higher end of the concession distribution); as more councils respond we'll firm it up.

Where each pound goes

One useful piece of context for everything in the browser: the cost stack per child differs enormously between school types.

• EHCP in a maintained mainstream/special school: ~£10k from the school's own funding + ~£18k LA top-up = ~£28k/year all-in.
• EHCP at an independent (NMI) day placement: ~£50k–£70k/year, paid directly by the LA.
• EHCP at an NMI residential placement: ~£80k–£150k/year.

That 2–3× gap is what makes Tribunal-forced placements so expensive on aggregate. For the full breakdown of how each tier is funded — Element 1/2/3, banding matrices, the High Needs Block, and what parents can use this for — see the deeper-dive post:

How the data was gathered

Two coordinated FOI batches went to all 152 English LAs on 16 April 2026. Batch 7528 (SEND Financial Data) asked seven questions on Tribunal legal costs, independent placements, EHCP provision spend, cease-to-maintain decisions, personal budgets, parental school preference and annual reviews. Batch 7529 (SEND Performance, Workforce and Provision) asked eleven questions on phase-transfer compliance, refusal-to-assess outcomes, EP timeliness and provenance, complaints, LGSCO decisions, staffing, EOTAS, independent placements and reduced timetables. Statutory deadline was 15 May 2026.

As of 20 May 2026 — five working days after the statutory deadline — 117 of 300 council-request pairs had returned substantive data; 129 had acknowledged but not yet responded; 9 had not replied at all. 45 councils returned a blanket refusal under s.12 (cost-of-compliance) or s.21 (already publicly available), and a further 42 partially refused while answering the rest. The browser above is updated as each new response lands.

More councils coming

As other local authorities respond to our FOI requests, we will publish each one here in the same format — same questions, same tables, same year-on-year comparisons — so parents can see how their own council compares.

If your council has not yet responded to a similar FOI request and you would like us to send one, get in touch. The data belongs to parents. The law says councils must release it. We are publishing it.