Samantha Booth

As part of Samantha Booth’s ongoing investigation into the broken Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) sector, she used FOI requests to reveal that while parents often have to fight in court to get support from cash-strapped councils for their children, private companies – several of them private equity firms, some registered in tax havens – are profiting handsomely from expensive independent schools established to meet rising demand for places.

And a story that should have been about the eye-watering day rates consultants charge to test reforms of the SEND system, based on accidentally-published documents by the Department for Education, turned into a bigger story about PA Consulting’s threatened injunction and hefty legal costs if the day-rates story was published. Booth managed to tell both stories – the gagging, and ‘The story we’re not allowed to tell’, extrapolating from the £7.6m figure PA is due for overseeing a pilot of the reforms a rate of around £380,000 for each of the 20 consultants employed on the project over a two-year period.

Booth shows “strong mastery of her specialism” and provides “insightful, robust, public interest journalism” that is all the more impressive given the lack of resources enjoyed by bigger publications, concluded the judges.