Education Information

Response to this request is long overdue. By law, under all circumstances, Newham Borough Council should have responded by now (details). You can complain by requesting an internal review.

Juliette Leandra

Dear Newham Borough Council,

I write to ask you to provide me with information regarding the education and school placements given to children under 16 years of age with Special Educational Needs who have EHC plans/ statements.

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like you to supply me with the information requested for the past 3 school years (2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18).

I would ask you to provide the information in an excel document, broken down under the following headings:

Academic Year (2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18)
Category of Need (ASD, SEMH, BESD, etc.)
Name of School
Type of school - (Maintained/non-maintained/independent/special)
Type of placement - (Day or 38 week placement)
Cost of placement per year

I would be grateful if you could send your response in csv. or Excel format within the 20 day reply period.

Yours faithfully,

Juliette Leandra

Newham Borough Council

Thank you for your email below.

We have received a high volume of requests regarding the provision of Special Educational Needs support within the Council over recent weeks. All of these requests have been received via What Do They Know? website request specific addresses and giving the same name of the requester.

We presently have seven requests which were received on 30th July which have been logged and are awaiting a response and a further similar request was logged on 1st August 2018.
A number of these requests are lengthy, with in excess of twenty questions each and as such will be particularly cumbersome on the relatively small section of Council to respond to.

We have therefore decided that for requests received in the near future of this nature, we will not be responding to under Section 14 of the FOI Act.
The ICO guidance states that where requests are likely “to cause a disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption” to the operations of the Authority, they may be refused on the grounds of being vexatious.

Section 14
Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the request is vexatious.

We consider that the high volume of lengthy requests, all relating to SEN or specific related areas of Education or Children’s Social Services would have a disproportionate impact on the public authority, both in terms of the strain on time and officer availability and recognise that dealing with unreasonable requests can place considerable pressure on team resources and obstruct our delivery of mainstream services. Whilst we appreciate the subject matter of your requests is legitimate and your intentions are valid, the authority cannot reasonably be expected to comply with the total of 23 requests submitted over an eight working day period, also taking into account the considerable length, detail and volume of information required in the majority of the requests.

Although each request alone or in isolation would not in itself be vexatious, due to the significant number of requests, of a similar nature and in a relatively short space of time and the significant strain on the authority’s resources in responding, we have aggregated the burden of all the requests received. We have therefore combined all requests received from you during the period and it is evident that in combination, the total requests, in responding, would exceed the appropriate set out by Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Indeed in attempting to respond to just one of the eight requests which have already been submitted and logged the service have considered that one request alone will be likely to exceed this appropriate limit in responding.

We have therefore determined any future requests, of a similar nature would cause unreasonable and unjustified impact on the working practices of the Authority and our time and abilities to undertake other work in these areas and will deem these to be vexatious in nature, under Section 14 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act.

We will honour the eight requests already logged and for which you have received acknowledgements, which we received between 30th July and 1st August but due to the aggregation of those further outstanding 15 requests, we will be unable to assist to logging these requests for a response for at least a further 60 calendar days, effective from 30th July 2018.

You are welcome to resubmit a reasonable number of further requests after the lapse of this time. Any similar or related requests received which are also considered to have been submitted in concert or through alternative means/names to the original requests which we have determined as being vexatious will also be refused on the ground given under Section 14 above.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
Kind regards

Information Governance
London Borough of Newham
Newham Dockside, 1000 Dockside Road, London E16 2QU

show quoted sections