Where the record is still blank

Two-thirds of England's councils have already told someone their SEND tribunal record. This is a map of where nobody has an answer yet — and why.

This isn't a ranking of good and bad councils. It's a map of where the public record is complete, and where it isn't — because those are very different things, and conflating them would misrepresent both.

The honest three-way split

Of England's 153 councils with SEND responsibility:

• 115 have answered a Freedom of Information request about their SEND tribunal record clearly enough to give real, usable figures.
• A handful more have answered, but not legibly — the council responded with a genuine substantive reply, but as a scanned image or a format nobody has transcribed yet. That's a data-entry gap, not an accountability one.
• 33 councils have simply never been asked this specific question, or the request that was sent to them never got a substantive reply — no clarification was resolved, no response arrived, the trail goes cold. These are genuine gaps: not evidence of anything, just an absence of data.

A small number of councils sit in a fourth, more pointed category: they were asked, and they declined to answer the tribunal-outcome question specifically. Kensington & Chelsea, Sutton, and Tower Hamlets each cited the statutory cost-limit exemption (section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act) and redirected the requester to national DfE statistics instead — which, as this site's own reporting shows, don't actually contain the local breakdown being asked for. Solihull refused on similar grounds, telling a requester the information "will eventually appear" in national statistics — which, again, isn't true of the outcome-level detail asked for. These are worth naming specifically, distinct from a council that simply hasn't been asked: a genuine information gap, closed by a citable, on-the-record refusal rather than silence.

Why "no answer yet" isn't a verdict

It would be easy to read a blank entry on this site as suspicious. Resist that reading. The pattern of who's been asked has nothing to do with council performance and everything to do with who happened to run a Freedom of Information campaign, and where: a few large, systematic requests (one covering 339 authorities, one covering 150, one covering all 32 London boroughs) account for most of the coverage that exists, and their gaps are simply wherever a particular council's answer got lost, refused on a technicality, or never chased up. A council with no data here may have an excellent tribunal record, a poor one, or anything in between — this site genuinely doesn't know, and says so.

What would actually close the gap

The FOI template that's worked most reliably asks HM Courts & Tribunals Service directly — not the council — for a named council's monthly appeals registered, heard, and their outcome. HMCTS holds this centrally for every council and, on the evidence gathered building this site, answers it within the statutory 20 working days when asked cleanly. WhatDoTheyKnow Pro's batch-request tool is built for sending the same question to many authorities at once, which is how most of the existing coverage was built in the first place.

The 33 genuine gaps are listed on the council list, marked "no record found" — that list is, in effect, the actual to-do list for closing this out.