Speacial characters not working

Hello There,

Please see the below request. This don't want to work when i use '&' here in xml. please let me know for the solution of this.

$xmlD = '<Potentials><row no="1">
                        <FL val="Study Duration / Plan">7 Years</FL>
                        <FL val="Field of Study">Arts</FL>
                        <FL val="Interview Date">2017/07/06</FL>
                        <FL val="Provisional Application Fee Paid">750</FL>
                        <FL val="Application Fee Paid">2000</FL>
                        <FL val="Interview Type">Skype</FL>
                        <FL val="Skype ID">rakeshusertesting</FL>
                        <FL val="Applied for RPL">Yes</FL>
                        <FL val="Interviewer"> <![CDATA["A & A"]]> </FL>
                        </row>
                </Potentials>';

        header("Content-type: application/xml");
        $id = '***********************';
        $url = " https://crm.zoho.com/crm/private/xml/Potentials/updateRecords";
        $param= "authtoken=".TOKEN."&scope=crmapi&id=".$id."&xmlData=".$xmlD;

        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $param);
        $result = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
        echo $result;
        die();