Freedom of Information
We asked all 152 English councils about SEND under the Freedom of Information Act. Here's what came back.
We used the Freedom of Information Act to ask every English council 54 questions about SEND — money, legal deadlines, tribunals, staffing. 132 responded. The verified picture: £883.6m of placement spend disclosed by a third of councils (roughly £2.4bn nationally), spend up 53% in two years, half of challenged refusals reversed — and only 21% of our questions answered at all.
In April 2026 we sent two coordinated requests under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to all 152 English local authorities — 54 questions covering the SEND figures councils don't normally publish. One request asked about money: tribunal legal spend, independent-placement costs, cost per EHCP, personal budgets. The other asked about performance: statutory deadlines, refusal-to-assess outcomes, educational-psychology delays, complaints, Ombudsman rulings, staffing and caseloads.
By law, every council had 20 working days to answer. This page is what actually came back — 132 councils' own disclosures, each re-checked against the council's original response document before publication. Where a council's own figures don't add up (several reported more challenges than decisions, or more reviews completed than were due), we say so on its page and exclude it from the national totals.
What all of this tells us
Five things, each in the councils' own numbers:
Refusals don't survive challenge
Across councils with internally-consistent figures, 52% of challenged refusal-to-assess decisions ended with the council reversing itself (6,820 of 13,147 challenges through mediation or tribunal), and 30% of tribunal appeals were conceded before a hearing — at some councils far more: Blackburn with Darwen 86%, Nottingham 76%, Coventry 71%.
This sits alongside the better-known Ministry of Justice statistic that ~98% of SEND appeals that reach a decided hearing are found for the parent. Our 52% is a wider measure — it counts every challenge from the moment it is raised, including cases withdrawn or still unresolved.
Read together: half of refusals collapse at the first push, and of the cases councils insist on defending all the way to a hearing, they lose almost all of them. If your council said no, the odds say challenge it.
The money is enormous and accelerating
Just 55 councils — roughly a third of England — disclosed £883.6m of independent-placement spend for 2024/25, implying a national bill around £2.4bn a year.
The same 52 councils that reported all three years went from £526m to £806m — up 53% in two years. A single placement runs £31k–£163k a year (median £57k).
Legal deadlines have become aspirations
Only 38% of educational-psychology advice met the six-week statutory deadline; roughly 4 in 10 annual reviews ran past the 12-month legal limit; a quarter of post-16 phase transfers missed the statutory date. These are not targets — they are duties in regulations.
The watchdog is escalating fast
Ombudsman decisions against the reporting councils rose from 13 a year to 162 a year over six years — ×12.5 — with annual financial remedies growing from £15,909 to £188,001. Compensation for failures already inflicted, buying no provision for any child.
Councils avoid the questions they'd score worst on
Of 31,555 individual question-rows we asked, only 21% came back answered. 42% were refused under section 12 (cost of compliance), 13% were "not held", and 22% were simply never addressed. A council that does not record whether it meets a legal duty is not monitoring it.
Everything below is browsable per council — pick yours and see its own numbers, charts and refusals.
The national picture · refreshed 10 July 2026
The system says no. Then pays anyway.
Two coordinated FOI requests — one on finances, one on performance and workforce — went to all 152 English local authorities in April 2026. 132 councils have now responded substantively to at least one request. Every figure below is a council's own disclosure, verifiable on WhatDoTheyKnow, and every headline number has been checked back against the source document. Where a council's own figures don't add up, we exclude them from the totals and say so.
£883.6m
independent-placement spend disclosed by just 55 councils for 2024/25 — one line of one FOI question.
~£2.4bn
estimated annual spend on independent / non-maintained special-school placements across England once scaled nationally.
52%
of challenged refusal-to-assess decisions ended with the council reversing itself (6,820 of 13,147 across 34 councils).
21%
of the individual questions asked actually came back answered. The rest: refused, "not held", or silence.
The money · independent-placement spend, same 52 councils
The 52 councils that disclosed independent / non-maintained placement expenditure for all three years spent £526m in 2022/23 and £806m in 2024/25 — up 53% in two years. This is the same set of councils each year, so the growth is real, not a reporting artefact.
↑ 53% over 2 years
Disclosed per-placement costs run from £31k to £163k a year (median £57k) — a five-fold spread for the same legal duty. Largest disclosed budgets 2024/25: Hampshire £92.8m, West Sussex £66.3m, Lancashire £57.1m.
The trend · every measure of SEND conflict is escalating
2019/20 → 2024/25, counting only councils that reported both endpoint years — the same councils at both ends of each comparison. These are not measures of demand; they are measures of the system failing to agree with families.
×1.9
Tribunal appeals lodged
1,036 → 2,018 · 13 councils
×2.0
Refusal-to-assess tribunal challenges
290 → 569 · 13 councils
×3.9
Formal SEND complaints
181 → 706 · 5 councils
×12.5
Ombudsman rulings against councils
13 → 162 · reporting cohort
Ombudsman decisions against councils, per year
↑ 1146% over 5 years
Ombudsman-ordered financial remedies across the same reporting councils grew from £15,909 (2019/20) to £188,001 (2024/25) — money paid as compensation for failures already inflicted.
The pattern · when families challenge, councils fold
Across councils whose figures are internally consistent, 30% of tribunal appeals are conceded before a hearing (2,391 of 7,919, 32 councils), and 52% of challenged refusal-to-assess decisions are overturned — 59% once the two largest councils are set aside. A concession before a hearing is a council admitting it would lose — a decision it should not have made. If your council refused, the data says: challenge it.
| Council | Conceded / appeals | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Blackburn with Darwen | 31 / 36 | 86% |
| Nottingham | 65 / 86 | 76% |
| Coventry | 261 / 367 | 71% |
| Bedford | 84 / 128 | 66% |
| Tameside | 86 / 147 | 59% |
| Warrington | 43 / 75 | 57% |
Some councils fold on almost everything: Nottingham conceded 34 of 35 appeals (97%) in 2022/23; Newham changed its refusal-to-assess position in 64 of 89 challenges (72%) in 2024/25. Meanwhile volumes climb — Birmingham lodged 610 appeals in a single year, Suffolk 478. Every figure in this table has been checked against the council's own response document.
The waste · councils refuse placements, lose, then pay for them anyway
The placements councils fight hardest are the ones they end up funding regardless — just later, and with legal costs and delay bolted on. Independent-placement spend is the dominant cost driver, and it is growing at almost every responding council.
Largest disclosed placement spend, 2024/25
- Hampshire£92.8m
- West Sussex£66.3m
- Lancashire£57.1m
- Cheshire East£39.0m
- Essex£38.2m
Two-year growth in placement spend (22/23 → 24/25)
- Walsall+143%
- Waltham Forest+129%
- East Riding+128%
- Nottinghamshire+122%
- Hampshire+71%
The money is spent either way. Walsall conceded 41 placements in 2025 before a hearing, plus 3 tribunal-ordered — roughly £2.4–3.1m of new annual cost obtained only through parents fighting — while its placement spend rose 143% (£5.9m → £14.3m) over the same period. The refusals saved nothing; they added legal cost and delay.
Statutory failure · legal deadlines have become aspirations
EP advice within the 6-week legal deadline (Reg 8)
- Only 38% on time across the 20 councils that gave usable counts.
- Worst: Redcar & Cleveland 9% (latest year: 6 of 292), Bristol 15%, Nottingham 18%, Hull 4.2% in 2023/24.
- Buckinghamshire collapsed from 87% (528 of 606) to under 4% (24 of 657) over five years.
- Bedford runs at 96–99% on time, fully in-house — it can be done.
Annual reviews completed within 12 months
- Only 54–62% on time across two independent question sets — roughly 4 in 10 legal deadlines missed.
- Southampton 10% (411 of 4,168), Bracknell Forest 27%, Milton Keynes 34%, Buckinghamshire 37%.
- Phase-transfer deadlines: 73% of post-16 transfers and 84% of other transfers met the statutory date.
- Several councils keep no timeliness records at all — a council that cannot say whether it meets a legal duty is not monitoring it.
Wasteful cost · money spent fighting parents is money not spent on provision
Thirty-four councils disclosed £11.2m of tribunal legal spend over three years — and it is rising sharply: Hampshire's external legal costs rose roughly 7× in two years (£21,893 → £153,881), plus £69,118 in-house, while it refused the cost questions it said would take 10,700 hours to answer. Ombudsman-ordered remedies across the reporting cohort grew from £15,909 to £188,001 a year over the same six years. Every pound here bought no provision for any child: it paid for refusals that were later abandoned, and compensation for failures already inflicted.
Transparency · councils refuse the questions they would score worst on
What happened to the 31,555 question-rows we asked
- Only 21% of questions were answered. The refusal machinery — s.12 "cost of compliance" — swallowed twice as many questions as were answered.
- The Section 12 wall. 22 councils refused the entire financial request and 33 the entire performance request. Some hold the data but refuse anyway; Hampshire pasted an identical 10,700-hour calculation into three separate refusals.
- The aggregation tactic. Surrey combined the two requests under s.12(4) to refuse both at once — releasing zero performance data while neighbouring authorities answered in full.
- Not held = not monitored. Where councils say figures are "not recorded", the honest reading is that they are not tracking their own statutory compliance.
- And when they do answer, the numbers don't always add up. Several councils reported more challenges than decisions, or more reviews completed than were due. Where a council's own figures are internally inconsistent we say so on its page and exclude it from the national totals.
Are independent placements the problem? No — for a child whose needs can't be met in a mainstream or maintained-special school, an independent specialist placement is usually the right outcome. The concern at the system level is that same-council spend grew 53% in two years, placements cost £31k–£163k each (median £57k), and a significant share are secured only through Tribunal pressure. That points to a failure of early intervention and local capacity — not to independent schools being wrong. Pick a council below to see its full response.
Browse councils
Data refreshed 10 July 2026 · 112 councilsPick a council to see its full FOI response.
Telford & Wrekin Council
FOI reference TWC-85420 · response by Daniel Hyde, Information Governance Team · response date 2026-04-28
What this council's performance data shows
The council reversed 97–100% of refusal-to-assess tribunal appeals in 2023 and 2024 (69% in 2025). Half of statutory EP advice missed the 6-week legal deadline. Zero parent-funded EP reports were accepted in either year.
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 EHCPs are actually funded — the £25k-per-child explainer
The three-element funding stack, how LA banding matrices work, what's bundled into 'EHCP provision spend', why NMI placements sit outside the model, and three things parents can use this for.
Read the funding explainerHow 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 10 July 2026, 230 of 300 council-request pairs have returned a substantive response — an answer, a partial answer, or a formal refusal. 66 are still sitting at "acknowledged, no response" nearly two months past the statutory deadline, and 4 have never replied at all. 55 whole-request refusals came back under s.12 (cost-of-compliance), and a further 92 requests were partially refused while answering the rest. Every response is re-checked against the council's own source document before it appears in the browser above; where a council's figures are internally inconsistent (more challenges than decisions, more reviews completed than were due), we flag that on its page and exclude it from national totals.
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.
See what your own EHCP says — really
Pathway analyses your draft or final EHCP against the legal tests councils try to defend at Tribunal. Catch vague provision, missing needs, and unenforceable wording before they cost you a hearing.
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