Electively Home Educated (EHE) Pupils for 2020/21-2024/25
Case reference FOI2026/01011
Received 28 April 2026
Published 21 May 2026
Request
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:
1a. Can you confirm the number of distinct pupils in the authority who were Electively Home educated (EHE) at any point in the academic year for the last five complete academic years, broken down by academic year (2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25).
1b. Please also provide the number of those who have an EHCP.
2a. Can you confirm the number of distinct pupils missing education (CME) at any point in the academic year for the last five complete academic years, broken down by academic year (2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25).
2b. Please also provide the number of those who have an EHCP.
I would be grateful if you could provide the above data as CSV/XLSX/ODS tables with one column per year and clear row headings.
If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under the Section 16 obligations of the Act, as to how I can refine my request.
Response
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:
1a. Can you confirm the number of distinct pupils in the authority who were Electively Home educated (EHE) at any point in the academic year for the last five complete academic years, broken down by academic year (2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25).
1b. Please also provide the number of those who have an EHCP.
2a. Can you confirm the number of distinct pupils missing education (CME) at any point in the academic year for the last five complete academic years, broken down by academic year (2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25).
2b. Please also provide the number of those who have an EHCP.
I would be grateful if you could provide the above data as CSV/XLSX/ODS tables with one column per year and clear row headings.
If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under the Section 16 obligations of the Act, as to how I can refine my request.
Answer: The information for questions 1b and 2b for academic years 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23, is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information.
The Service Area have advised: Our EHCP reporting system is updated on an event driven basis. Due to plans being issued, discontinued or children transferring out of the local authority, we are currently unable to easily report historic SEND characteristics. To derive the figures would require investigating each case to ascertain whether an EHCP was current during the period of EHE. We also did not routinely record the EHCP status for CME young people in 2020/21, 2021/22 or 2022/23 and each individual young person’s records would need to be checked.
To ascertain the data requested, officers would need to manually check individual files for this information. An initial search has shown that 2,054 files for question 1b and 117 files for question 2b for financial years 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23 (totalling 2,171 files) would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take between 5-10 minutes to check each file. Once the details had been identified this would need to be noted and once all files had been checked in this way, the total figures requested could be calculated.
This would at a conservative estimate take between 180-361 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
However, within the 18 hour limit, we can provide answers for questions 1a, 2a and 2b for the financial years 2023/24 and 2024/25, as requested. Please advise us if this is something you require.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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