Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) for financial year 22/23
Case reference FOI2024/00015
Published 31 January 2024
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act, please can you provide me with information on:
For last year (2022/23), and within the local authority area:
(a) What was the average cost to relevant providers of delivering Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs);
(b) How many EHCPs specified teaching assistant support under Section F.
For (a), please can the average cost be provided as both (i) the mean and (ii) the median, where held.
If information is held on the average cost of EHCPs, but that information is calculated on a different basis to that outlined above, then please could those estimates be provided instead.
If information is held on the average cost of EHCPs, but those estimates are not inclusive of all providers (for example, if NHS providers are not included), then please could the estimates for the providers that figures are held for be given instead.
Response
Under the Freedom of Information Act, please can you provide me with information on:
For last year (2022/23), and within the local authority area:
(a) What was the average cost to relevant providers of delivering Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs);
(b) How many EHCPs specified teaching assistant support under Section F.
For (a), please can the average cost be provided as both (i) the mean and (ii) the median, where held.
If information is held on the average cost of EHCPs, but that information is calculated on a different basis to that outlined above, then please could those estimates be provided instead.
If information is held on the average cost of EHCPs, but those estimates are not inclusive of all providers (for example, if NHS providers are not included), then please could the estimates for the providers that figures are held for be given instead.
A) For query b) this information 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. To ascertain the data requested, officers would need to manually check individual files for this information. An initial search has shown that more than 1,500 files would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 5 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 at least 125 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.
For query a), we do not hold this information as the cost to relevant providers of delivering each individual EHC Plan is not recorded.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.