11 September 2026
Hertfordshire's SEND "star chamber": the secret panel that decides children's school places is told to delete its own records — against the Council's own retention policy
In Hertfordshire, the panel that decides whether a child gets a specialist school place sits in private, keeps no minutes, and is instructed by its own rulebook to delete its papers after every meeting — "in line with GDPR". GDPR requires nothing of the kind. The Council's own retention schedule says these records must be kept for 35 years. And in 2012 the Council told the public that panel decisions and reasons were recorded and available to any parent who asked. Today a parent asking the same question is told "no recordings are made and there is no access". Somebody wrote the deletion rule; nobody has said who, when, on what advice, or whether anyone checked it against the policy the Council already had. The Justify Foundation has demanded the answers under the Freedom of Information Act.
The full press release is here