EHC assessments and social care advice and information

The request was partially successful.

Educational Rights Alliance (ERA)

Dear West Sussex County Council,

Regulation 6 Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014 sets out the advice that the Local Authority must secure as part of an Education Health and Care Needs Assessment. Part of that Regulation requires that advice and information in relation to social care is obtained during the EHC Needs Assessment.

Please advise the following with regard to EHC Needs Assessments from Sep 2014 to date, on a year by year basis. Do include new applications and transfers from Statement of SEN and LDA.

1. How many EHC Needs Assessments were carried out?

2. How many of (1) included a social care assessment?

3. How many of (2) were new to social care?

4. Where a social care assessment was NOT carried out as part of the EHC Needs Assessment for a child or young person NEW to social care, what social care advice was provided?

Yours faithfully,

Educational Rights Alliance (ERA)

Freedom of Information Act,

Dear ERA,

Thank you for your enquiry, which has been forwarded to the appropriate officers for a response. The usual timescale for a response is twenty working days, that is by or on 10th November.

If for any reason the Council needs to extend this timescale you will be notified in accordance with the relevant legislation.

Please note that in 2012 the County Council adopted a position in principle that FoI and EIR requests to West Sussex County Council and the Council's responses may be published on the Council's website in a suitably anonymised form. This is in addition to the individual response to the requestor, and in line with the Council's commitment to transparency and open data.

Yours sincerely,

Kerry Rickman

Freedom Of Information, Communities Directorate | West Sussex County Council | Location: County Hall, Chichester PO19 1RQ | E-mail: [email address]

Dear Sir/Madam

I refer to your request dated 13th October, 2017 which has been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Your request was for:

Please advise the following with regard to EHC Needs Assessments from Sep 2014 to date, on a year by year basis. Do include new applications and transfers from Statement of SEN and LDA.

1. How many EHC Needs Assessments were carried out?

2. How many of (1) included a social care assessment?

3. How many of (2) were new to social care?

4. Where a social care assessment was NOT carried out as part of the EHC Needs Assessment for a child or young person NEW to social care, what social care advice was provided?

We have now completed a search for the information which you requested and I confirm the Authority holds information relevant to the request.

Please see answers below corresponding with the numbers on your request.

Question 1:

Sept 2014 - Aug 2015 - 238
Sept 2015 - Aug 2016 - 369
Sept 2016 - Aug 2017 - 373
Total 980

Question 2/3/4:

I confirm that the authority holds information falling within the description specified in Questions 2, 3 and 4. However, we estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit has been specified in regulations and for local authorities it is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2 1/2 working days in determining whether the Department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information eg reviewing 980 files. Under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act the Department is not obliged to comply with your request and we will not be processing further.

If you were to make a new request for a narrower category of information, it may be that we could comply with that request within the appropriate limit, although I cannot guarantee that this will be the case. You may wish to ask for assistance in narrowing your request.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. You are free to use it for your own purposes, including any non-commercial research you are doing and for the purposes of news reporting. Any other reuse, for example commercial publication, would require the permission of the copyright holder. Most documents supplied by us will be copyright of West Sussex County Council.

Information you receive which is not subject to WSCC copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. You must ensure that you gain their permission before reproducing any third party (non WSCC) information.

If you have any queries about this response, please contact me.

If you are unhappy with the way your request has been handled, you may wish to ask for a review of our decision via [email address]

If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you may apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally, the ICO cannot make a decision unless you have exhausted our internal review procedure. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:

The Information Commissioner's Office,
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.

Yours sincerely
Sue Bryan