6 February - Not good at answering FOIs. Not good at educating SEND pupils
Having added 25% to my personal lifetime FOI submission score in the first five weeks
of 2025 it may be wise for me to take a closer interest in the subject instead of just
parroting @tonyofsidcup’s successes. Presumably the chance of being labelled vexatious is zero given that
the Court ruled that @tony couldn’t be because some
of his answers are published here. He was said to be performing a public service.
Not that I am planning on pushing my luck.
When submitting my most recent set of questions I was asked to check that the
answers were not already available in Bexley’s FOI archive and further research
led to the website
whatdothey know.com before it went off air for exceeding its bandwidth
quota. Fortunately I took a screen shot of what I thought was a quite interesting one.
A lady had submitted an FOI to every local authority about Special Needs
Education (SEND) and home schooling. How many of this that and the other and
presumably easy enough for anyone with an abacus to count. Bexley Council was
alone in playing silly buggers.
They answered the questions up to a point but hid the answer behind a password
which expired in seven days. I caught it just in time. If I had not it would
have been tempting to resubmit the lady’s questions so that I could see the
answers and thwart Bexley Council’s hope that their response would be quickly lost to public view.
Bexley Council refused to say how many young people with an Education, Health
and Care Plan have no school allocated. Home educated EHCP children numbered
25. 32 were educated outside of a school or home setting. 20 have been allocated
personal budgets but the Council refused to say how many of them were to fund
out of school education on the grounds that counting was too much work. (How
difficult can it be to flip through the records of 20 children?)
They also refused to answer the same question relating to Home Education but
were prepared to say that payments were paid once per term and totalled £462,878
last year. (25 pupils at nearly £20k. each.)
The FOI lady then spent months pursuing her questions
about the money Bexley Council may have spent on legal fees fighting indefensible
complaints but until whatdotheyknow pays its hosting fees that is going to have to wait. I only remember that it was a lot.
The chart shown here is not, for a change, one of @tony’s but it follows
the same trend.
Bexley is the worst performing Council in London. Note the name Bexley right at
the top of the chart furthest from the red line.
It comes from the Department of Education and purports to show that SEND pupils
do best in boroughs with high residential incomes and plots their GCSE
achievement against non-SEND pupils. Not the easiest statistic to get one’s
head around but there is a reasonable explanation at
the swlondoner news website.
Suffice to say Bexley for all its bragging is the outlier and the worst performer in London. Again.