Henry Bloom Noble School- numbers of EAL and SEN pupils

Summary

The request sought detailed statistics on EAL and SEN pupils, staffing, and budgets at Henry Bloom Noble School for September 2024 and early 2025. The Department of Education provided pupil counts, new joiner data, and native language breakdowns, but withheld nationality data due to lack of records and redacted specific language counts for small groups to protect privacy.

Key Facts

• As of April 2, 2025, the school had 142 SEN pupils and 144 EAL pupils.
• The total school roll as of April 2, 2025, was 401 students.
• Since September 2024, there were 31 new EAL joiners and 14 new SEN joiners.
• The school does not hold nationality data for EAL pupils, only native language information.
• Specific language counts for groups of five or fewer pupils were redacted to prevent identification.

Data Disclosed

• 124
• 113
• 142
• 144
• 401
• 19
• 31
• 14
• 7
• 21
• 11
• 38
• 18
• 12
• 2025-03-19
• 2025-04-16
• 2nd April 2025
• September 2024

Exemptions Cited

• Information relating to five or less pupils (privacy/redaction)
• Information not held by the school (nationality data)

Original Request

Please provide information on number of children with either English as Additional Language or Special Educational Needs on the school roll as at September 2024 and the most recently available data in 2025. details of the total school roll, number per year and class sizes as at September 2024 and most recently available 2025 data. How many new joiners since September 2024 had EAL/SEN or both details of the EAL different nationalities that the school currently supports (number of pupils of each nationality - where this is less than 3 can the information be grouped by region eg Other European, Other Middle East etc) number of dedicated Henry Bloom Noble School EAL and SEN teachers and other assistants and their hours per week and how many per pupil with these needs. Details of any DESC additional EAL and SEN direct support provided including number of staff and their hours per week. Annual budget allocated for EAL and SEN support Information about any concerns raised by the Head or school staff with DESC concerning ability to support EAL or SEN pupils adequately

Data Tables (1)

Full Response Text

Policy, Strategy and Governance Division Department of Education, Sport and Culture Thie Slieau Whallian Foxdale Road St Johns IM4 3AS

Telephone: (01624) 685808 Website: www.gov.im/dec Email: dec@foi.gov.im

Our ref: 4525989 16th April 2025

Dear ###

We write further to your request, received 19 March 2025, which states:

"Please provide

information on number of children with either English as Additional Language or Special Educational Needs on the school roll as at September 2024 and the most recently available data in 2025.

details of the total school roll, number per year and class sizes as at September 2024 and most recently available 2025 data.

How many new joiners since September 2024 had EAL/SEN or both

details of the EAL different nationalities that the school currently supports (number of pupils of each nationality - where this is less than 3 can the information be grouped by region eg Other European, Other Middle East etc)

number of dedicated Henry Bloom Noble School EAL and SEN teachers and other assistants and their hours per week and how many per pupil with these needs.

Details of any DESC additional EAL and SEN direct support provided including number of staff and their hours per week.

Annual budget allocated for EAL and SEN support

Information about any concerns raised by the Head or school staff with DESC concerning ability to support EAL or SEN pupils adequately"

Our response to your request is as follows:

1. information on number of children with either English as Additional Language or Special Educational Needs on the school roll as at September 2024 and the most recently available data in 2025.

September 2024 Special Educational Needs (SEN) - 124
English as an Additional Language (EAL) - 113

Current data as of 2nd April 2025 SEN – 142 EAL– 144

1. details of the total school roll, number per year and class sizes as at September 2024 and most recently available 2025 data.

September 2024

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, under section 20 of the Act, we are not required to provide information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you, whether free of charge or on payment of a fee.

By way of advice and assistance school roll data is published annually by the Department and is available to view via the following weblink –

www.gov.im/media/1386790/school-roll-data-september-2024.pdf

Current data as at 2nd April 2025

Number on roll - 401

Henry Bloom Noble Primary School have a Specialist Provision Centre (SPC) with 19 children

Reception – 2 classes 21 and 22

Year 1 – 2 classes 27 and 27

Year 2 - 2 classes 21 and 20

Year 3/4 - 2 classes 30 and 29

Year 4 - 2 classes 30 and 29

Year 5 - 2 classes 33 and 32

Year 6 – 3 classes 21, 19, 21

1. How many new joiners since September 2024 had EAL/SEN or both

31 EAL and 14 SEN

1. details of the EAL different nationalities that the school currently supports (number of pupils of each nationality - where this is less than 3 can the information be grouped by region eg Other European, Other Middle East etc)

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Henry Bloom Noble Primary School do not hold the information that you have requested.

By way of advice and assistance the school hold information on the children’s native languages but not their nationality. The information held is as follows:

Arabic – 7 Middle eastern – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Bulgarian – 21 Asian – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Chinese – 11 Eastern European – 7 Filipino – 38 Malayalam – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Niger – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Polish – 18 Portuguese – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Russian – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Ukrainian – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils] Other African – 12 Other Asian - 7 Other European – [Redacted – Information relating to five or less pupils]

1. number of dedicated Henry Bloom Noble School EAL and SEN teachers and other assistants and their hours per week and how many per pupil with these needs.

Henry Bloom Noble Primary School has an SPC which has 3 specialist SEN teachers. Within mainstream the school do not have specialist SEN or EAL teachers - all teaching staff support pupils with SEN and EAL across the school.

Henry Bloom Noble Primary School has 13.2 Full time equivalent support staff to support SEN across the school (in mainstream). They also support our EAL pupils within class.

The way we support our EAL children changes from week to week based on new arrivals.

1. Details of any DESC additional EAL and SEN direct support provided including number of staff and their hours per week.

1 level 3 Senior Education Support assistant – 0.8 FTE
1 level 2 Education Support assistant – 0.8 FTE

1. Annual budget allocated for EAL and SEN support

EAL Budget 2024/25 SEN Support Budget 2024/25 0 £ 454,589

The EAL budget is held centrally within the Education Advice and Support Division, the budget for EAL for 2024/25 is £353,786.

1. Information about any concerns raised by the Head or school staff with DESC concerning ability to support EAL or SEN pupils adequately

Henry Bloom Noble Primary School emailed the Department of Education, Sport and Culture’s Chief Officer, Graham Kinrade, on 7th Nov 2024 to raise concerns that they had 15 new pupils with EAL enrol between September and the start of November and that they were about to gain [Redacted – less than five] children from Ukraine.

The school were concerned about how they would support the increasing number of children with EAL within current staffing levels.

Please note, after this email the school were temporarily allocated 2 FTE level 2 Education Support assistants for 2 terms. This will ending at Easter and as such the information is not included in the information provided in response to request 6 of this response.

Redacted Content

S39 (1)(a)(b)- Qualified exempt personal information

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information held in the instances where information relates to five or less pupils as the Department determines that individual pupil's may be identifiable.

This information is exempt under Section 39 of the Freedom of Information Act 2015 (Qualified exempt personal information) as it constitutes personal data of a person other than you and under section 8 of the Data Protection Act 2002 the data subject would be entitled to prevent disclosure of the information to a member of the public otherwise than under that Act.

As Section 39 is a qualified exemption, it is subject to a public interest test. The public interest must be something that is of serious concern and benefit to the public at large.

Factors in favour of disclosing the information include: - To promote transparency & accountability.

Factors in favour of maintaining the exemption include:
- That pupils and their parents/carers have an expectation that their child’s personal information will remain confidential. Disclosure of this information would contravene that expectation and cause an intrusion into the privacy of the data subject which may lead to some distress.

• Whilst the Freedom of Information Act 2015 promotes transparency and accountability and therefore there may be some public interest it is not sufficient to outweigh an individual pupil’s right for this information to remain private.

In assessing the weight to be attributed to each of the factors in favour of disclosing the information and maintaining the exemption, the Department of Education, Sport and Culture has taken the following into consideration:
- The severity of the prejudice
- The age of the information - How far disclosure would further the public interest identified above - Whether there is any similar information the public domain and whether this affects the public interest.

In taking these factors into account the Department of Education, Sport and Culture have determined that the factors in favour of maintaining the exemption outweigh the factors in favour of disclosing the information.

Please quote the reference number 4525989 in any future communications.

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I will now close your request as of this date.

Yours sincerely