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Suffolk County Council
Data availableEast of England
279
appeals registered, 2024 (official DfE figure)
472
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 — 342 (72.6%)
Contested, council lost — 86 (18.3%)
Contested, council won — 23 (4.9%)
Partially split — 20 (4.2%)
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 (472 appeals) — see how estimates work.
By decision type
By decision type — 2022/23 academic year (1 Sep 2022 - 31 Aug 2023)
| Category (council's own wording) | Appeals | Overturned |
|---|---|---|
| taken to Tribunal for refusal to assess | 5 | 3 |
| refusal to issue... taken to Tribunal and overturned | 0 | 0 |
| appealed to SENDIST and had changes upheld | 15 | — |
Freedom of Information responses
Successful
The council's formal reply was delivered as an unreadable .doc attachment, but the requester's own follow-up email (4 Sept 2024) quotes several of the original 28-Sept-2023 answers verbatim while chasing updates on the ones still pending. As originally reported by the council: 'Of the EHC Needs Assessment applications in the year, 5 were taken to Tribunal for refusal to assess. 3 were not opposed, 2 do not yet have an outcome.' 'How many decisions to issue/not issue were made within the 16 week timeframe? 50 of the 726 completed in the year. 333 are still within the 16 week timeframe.' 'How many did you refuse to issue a plan for? 0' / 'refusal to issues taken to mediation and overturned? 0' / 'taken to Tribunal and overturned? 0' / 'conceded before tribunal? 0' / 'legal spend on these appeals? Nil.' 'Overall how many EHCPs were issued that year? 865.' 'How many were appealed to SENDIST and had changes upheld? 15 appealed to SENDIST, no outcome yet [at Sept 2023 reporting date].'
Caveat: At the time of the original response (Sept 2023), 2 of the 5 refusal-to-assess tribunal cases and all 15 EHCP-content (SENDIST) appeals for this year were still pending with no recorded outcome — so the actual won/lost split for most contested cases in this year is NOT resolved in the text we could recover. A follow-up response (2 Oct 2024, ref 24849) that should update these pending outcomes was also delivered only as an unreadable .doc attachment. This is part of a long-running annual FOI series by the same requester using an almost identical question template (threads exist covering 2018/19 through 2024/25 — see 'EHCP Stats Sep 23- Aug 24', 'EHCP Statistics 2024/25' etc. on Suffolk's WhatDoTheyKnow page for the other years, which follow the same pattern of doc-locked answers). Suffolk County Council refused the 2024/25 iteration of this same request in Oct 2025, citing FOIA Section 12 cost-limit aggregation with other requests from a 'Campaign for Change – Suffolk SEND' group.
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