Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council

Council refused the substantive request under FOIA s.22 (information held with a view to future publication), stating that most questions (appeal/refusal counts and upheld counts, EHCP headcount/setting split, EOTAS, no-placement count) would appear in the Department for Education's national SEN2 return, expected around June of the following year. On the 'parental preference for placement named' question the council explicitly read this — 'due to the nature and ordering of the questions' — as asking about Section I Tribunal appeals upheld in the parent's favour, and said that figure would likewise be in the DfE SEN2 data; if the question instead meant EHCPs generally naming a parent's preferred setting, that part was declined separately under s.12 (cost limit; council said checking over 2,000 individual files manually would be required). No figures of any kind were disclosed. The requester lodged internal review challenges on 9 and 20 January 2023 (citing ICO guidance that s.22 requires a genuine publication-intention analysis and a documented public interest test); no further correspondence appears on the public thread after 20 Jan 2023.