Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many requests her Department has received under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for documents relating to the opening of (a) academies and (b) free schools; and how many of those requests it responded to within the 20 working day time limit.

Quarterly and annual statistics on Freedom of Information requests received by a number of central government monitored bodies (including all departments of state), including timeliness of reply, are published by the Ministry of Justice at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics

The Department received 1,039 requests relating to academies and 666 relating to free schools between the first quarterly period of 2010 and third quarterly period of 2015. Of these, 854 and 470 respectively were answered within the 20 working day time limit.

The Department is not able to determine how many of these requests were related to the opening of particular schools without incurring disproportionate cost.