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Essex County Council
Data availableEast of England
709
appeals registered, 2024 (official DfE figure)
844
appeals registered, 2025 (official DfE figure)
Data available. At least one Freedom of Information response gives real, extractable figures on tribunal appeals or outcomes for this council.
Estimated outcome breakdown
Estimated, not reported
Resolved before hearing — 612 (72.5%)
Contested, council lost — 155 (18.4%)
Contested, council won — 41 (4.9%)
Partially split — 36 (4.3%)
This council's own answer doesn't give a usable outcome breakdown. This estimate applies the pooled England-wide outcome rate (no regional sample was large enough to trust on its own) to this council's own real, officially-published appeal volume for 2025 (844 appeals) — see how estimates work.
Freedom of Information responses
Successful
Question as put: 'Nationally 98% of tribunal appeals for EHCP's are lost by the Local Authority. What's the percentage for Essex?' Recoverable fragment of the council's answer (the full answer was delivered via a Word document and several 'SEND.MS data.xlsx' spreadsheets — covering 2019/20 through 2023/24 — none of which could be machine-read with available tools): 'I can confirm that Essex County Council does hold this information... In the 2023 calendar year, Essex County Council received 314 appeals against...' [text is cut off in the recoverable portion]. The actual won/lost percentage that was the crux of the question was NOT recovered.
Caveat: A full detailed year-by-year answer clearly exists (attachments named 'ECC... FOI Publishing Template.docx' and five annual 'SEND.MS data.xlsx' files spanning 2019/20-2023/24) but none of it could be extracted as text with available tools. Manual review of the attachments at the URL above is recommended for the complete figures.
Awaiting classification
Legal representation/advice costs for appeals to the First-Tier SEND Tribunal, by year: 2020: £53,093; 2021: £121,597; 2022: £134,769; 2023: £111,939; 2024: £96,862.83 (partial year, to Oct 2024). 'The Council does not hold reportable data for the period between 1st J[anuary 2019...]' (snippet truncated). NOTE: this response should also answer how many SEND appeals were received and how many were found in favour of the Council (per the standard 4-question LBC template — see the Bedford, Norfolk and Peterborough entries in this file for the same template answered in full), but that portion of Essex's reply was embedded as images within the email body and could not be extracted with available tools.
Caveat: This is cost data only for the metrics we could confirm; the appeal-volume and in-favour-of-council figures were provided but as embedded images, not machine-readable.
Partially successful
NOT EXTRACTED. The response was delivered entirely as embedded images (image001.png/image002.png/image003.png etc. across two response emails) which could not be machine-read with available tools. The original request is very rich and squarely on-topic: cases lodged at tribunal for Section B/F/I appeals per year 2019-2021, number conceded by the LA before tribunal, number conceded by parents before tribunal, number of rulings in favour of parents/child, number of rulings in favour of the Local Authority, whether the LA's barrister was also an LA employee, and annual legal spend. Manual review recommended.
Caveat: Flagged as a promising unread lead alongside the two entries above, not verified data.