Even though it pains me to say so, the following FOI question and answer from a well-respected county council raises some interesting questions about audit and governance, and the monitoring of expenditure on SEND pupils.

Question: How many young people had EOTAS packages of over £100,000 granted by xxx County Council during the 2024/25 financial year, and of these packages, what was the largest amount of any package in operation during the financial year?

Answer: The information is not held in a centralised format. Therefore, to be able to obtain it, a manual audit would need to happen to cross-reference systems for 153 individual electronic records and associated financial systems to determine the total cost of each child or young person’s combined EOTAS package, each taking 20 minutes to locate, retrieve and collate, totalling 51 hours.

So, it appears that the county council in question does not know how much it is spending on each child with an EOTAS (Education Other than at School) package. It seemingly knows how much is being spent on each element of the package, but doesn’t have a spreadsheet that allows all elements to be brought together in a total per child.

Now it is not for me to question the lack of curiosity of the Director of Children’s Services or the Lead Member in the authority, let alone the Director of Finance, but it was an element of spending that I was concerned enough about to monitor when I was a cabinet member.

I have the same question out to a number of other local authorities, so it will be interesting to see whether I receive the same sort of answer. What is probably the case is that these packages are contributing to the High Needs block deficits in many local authorities.

A second shire county told me it couldn’t answer the question because the number was less than five, and might thus reveal details about an individual: fair enough, but I assume it means that there are somewhere between one and five such packages of more than £100,000 per child. It would be interesting to know what such education packages might contain, and why they are so expensive.

At a Scrutiny Committee meeting in November 2024, Oxfordshire County Council officers told the committee in a Report about EOTAS in 2024 “The annual spend as of November 2024 is £2.1 million for 52 children and young people.” (para 18 Report to Scrutiny Committee) That is an average of £40,000 per child with an EOTAS package.

EOTAs packages are as a result of s61 of the Children and Families Act 2014.

61Special educational provision otherwise than in schools, post-16 institutions etc

(1) A local authority in England may arrange for any special educational provision that it has decided is necessary for a child or young person for whom it is responsible to be made otherwise than in a school or post-16 institution or a place at which relevant early years education is provided.

(2) An authority may do so only if satisfied that it would be inappropriate for the provision to be made in a school or post-16 institution or at such a place.

(3) Before doing so, the authority must consult the child’s parent or the young person.

Might it be time for the National Audit Office to have a deep dive into this part of SEND spending to see whether the expenditure is producing the desired results for these young people?