Freedom of Information request

[synaesthesia]

It goes to show it's a two way street and perhaps we all need to learn something - @bmaloney hopefully will take away from this that asking people to click a random link from an unsolicited email is a very bad idea. As a parent he/she may not be aware of the dangers of doing so. Life is so much easier when all parties communicate clearly and respectfully

[minimoo]

two further thoughts:

a) I wonder if there is requirement for an organisation (for FOI/other purposes) to have an email address. i.e. could schools have a web form that all correspondence goes through and not have a public email address. That would protect from viruses etc

 

b) Something that might help bmaloney's case - under the GDPR if Parent A completes an admission form and is asked to list personal data (i.e. name + address + contact number) of Parent B, does the school need consent from Parent B

[FN-GM]

So you get an unsolicited email from an unfamiliar noreply@ address asking you to click a link? We spend a long time educating staff and pupils not to follow these kind of links in emails. Would you follow the link? I wouldn’t, especially after the ICO has told you not to [emoji6]

 

I would rather discuss the issue with the requester by contacting them either at a valid, monitored email address or over phone but the requester is not willing to do this, hasn’t provided valid contact details and hasn’t submitted a valid request. The request is dead easy to fix and I’m surprised that given the strength of the requesters feelings on this matter, it hasn’t been done.

 

You also get told not to open or respond to emails from people you don't know....

 

It would depend on where the link goes to. If it was a Google Form for example it will be harmless.

[mavhc]

Do you need an audit trail of what you did to respond to a FOI request? Does a web form provide that?

 

Was the email plain text or html? Can't trust a link in an html email.

[mavhc]

I've had some schools phone me up at work demanding my postal address. You may notice my phone number is not in the original request. Please don't phone me up, I don't have time for a chat with every school in the country.

 

If only there were some way to email you to ask for it...

[sparkeh]

You also get told not to open or respond to emails from people you don't know....

 

It would depend on where the link goes to. If it was a Google Form for example it will be harmless.

 

It was just a url that was unknown to us. Therefore we had no idea what was at the other end. Hence the non clicking. Anyway, I am perfectly happy following the guidance from the ICO [emoji3]

[bmaloney]

minimoo - complying with the law comes with the territory. If you don't like the job, get a different one, but school's can't pick and choose which laws they comply with.

 

The documents you link to (note how you're asking me to click on links from an unfamiliar message in a forum) refer to admission authorities. Those admission authorities also have a duty to ensure that everyone with Parental Responsibility for a child agrees to the application for the place, so they have to know who has parental responsibility. Do you think they do that? No they don't, but that's a future project.

 

A parent on the birth certificate has Parental Responsibility, unless it's been removed by court order. Schools have an obligation to find out who has parental responsibility for children, it should be on their register for the child. This affects decisions about education, school trips, some parts of the curriculum and any medical treatment given to the child. Schools are there to educate the children on behalf of the parent, parents don't have to use a particular school or send their child to a school at all.

 

If you don't know who your parents are, how can you treat them all equally?

[bmaloney]

You could correspond with me via a website, such as this one, or the one I set up for the purpose. This is a means of correspondence between parties in writing via a URL, how is it OK to use this forum, but not someone else's webform?

[bmaloney]

two further thoughts:

a) I wonder if there is requirement for an organisation (for FOI/other purposes) to have an email address. i.e. could schools have a web form that all correspondence goes through and not have a public email address. That would protect from viruses etc

No it isn't. Many school's don't publish email addresses on their website, using contact webforms instead. The DfE does not publish an email address for making a FOI request, nor does the Department for Transport of the Department for Health and Social Care. When I made an FOI request about this policy to the DfE they replied from an "ACCOUNT, Unmonitored, Department for Education" email address. They will then push you back through their webform to correspond. This is the government department responsible for schools.

b) Something that might help bmaloney's case - under the GDPR if Parent A completes an admission form and is asked to list personal data (i.e. name + address + contact number) of Parent B, does the school need consent from Parent B

The details of all parents with PR should be on the admission form and they should all consent to the application, if not you need to resolve it in school. More interesting is the case where two parents with PR and shared care apply to different schools because they live in different catchment areas. What do you do then?

[Ditto]

I rather fear this isn't going to go well... which is a shame as I genuinely believe there are important points from both sides of the discussion.

[elsiegee40]

 

I am stepping in here to advise all parties to breathe deeply and think carefully about what and how they post.

 

Antagonising each other gets nobody anywhere.... standard rules for this forum apply in this thread as in any other.

 

[sparkeh]

Thanks @elsiegee40

Shame, I had hoped that something useful would come out if this, I am actually a great believer in the FOI act. However I will now withdraw and wait for a reworked, valid FOI request to arrive [emoji853]

[Achandler]

Ignoring all the complaints about how the request was made, and the fact it doesn't comply with the rules set out. This is all done for the benefit of the requestor only and adds to the task for the schoool, requests accepting PDFs for example, mean you can easily upload the documentation to your website and then it is available to anyone, which is in theory a longer term benefit, and not in one persons private collection. I don't personally see why the requestor shouldn't be expected to do some legwork as well, and say either use this form or send via a pdf or similar, best of both worlds.

 

I won't go into schools ringing you, because that's ridiculous!

 

I don't work in a school anymore, but as soon as anyone claimes that they taxes pay the public sectors wages, I kind of lose hope. Police get told it, the fire service do, the ambulance service, and it feels like an entitlement society. You can gaurantee to not got anyone help you any more then the minimum amount they have to.

 

I don't know how much tax people pay, but I find it amusing when one person in the street claims to pay someone wages as they probably contribute pennies to each persons salary. An FOI request to every school in England (say 24,000), even if it costs every school only £5 to process it, costs the country as a whole (and all the tax payers inevitably) over £100,000.

 

Every FOI request costs huge amounts to process, whether it is a legitimate concern that a parent is on a crusade to solve a real issue (which is often needed to force changes), a business trying to glean information or anything else. Without public authorities being able to simply ignore the requests that fail to meet the correct format, then we will evitably end up with anything that isn't right but seems right having to be responded to. If someone really wants the information then stick to the formats a public authority has to respond to, then you will get the information, but also remember ever request costs every tax payer money to process, so make sure the request is for a legitimate reason (I have no idea whether this one is or isn't).

[enjay]

No it isn't. Many school's don't publish email addresses on their website, using contact webforms instead. The DfE does not publish an email address for making a FOI request, nor does the Department for Transport of the Department for Health and Social Care. When I made an FOI request about this policy to the DfE they replied from an "ACCOUNT, Unmonitored, Department for Education" email address. They will then push you back through their webform to correspond. This is the government department responsible for schools.

 

You're confusing how you may choose to send an FOI request and how we have to respond. You can send your FOI request via the Contact Us form on our website, but we cannot respond to it via yours. If you don't want to fill out our Contact Us form, you're welcome to snail-mail us with your request. In either case, include a valid (as defined by the ICO) means of responding, and we will respond.

 

You could correspond with me via a website, such as this one, or the one I set up for the purpose. This is a means of correspondence between parties in writing via a URL, how is it OK to use this forum, but not someone else's webform?

 

In fairness, we have nothing but your word for it you are the originator of the FOI, so I'm not about to send our response in a Direct Message to you on Edugeek. I suppose if in your FOI request you said "I'm bmaloney on edugeek, please message me on there" we might (although personally I would still check that with the ICO before I responded).

Edited March 5, 2018 by elsiegee40

[bmaloney]

OK, let's imagine it's you that wants to make a Freedom of Information request to all Schools in England and Wales. There's about 20,000, you could send them all a letter and ask them to reply by post. Quite apart from the cost of printing and the time taken to stuff 20,000 envelopes the cost of a first class stamp for each would be £11,200. Assuming every school replied with a single sheet of A4 the volume of responses would be about 2m^3 of post. Again schools have to pay to sent it by post, which is printing and postage.

 

Imagine having to open and read all the responses and then put them in a database for collation. At 5 minutes per response, that's 208 days at 8hrs a day. That's assuming the school actually puts unique identifying information on their response, which many schools don't. They assume you know which one of the dozens of St. Thomas' school in the country that they are.

 

So let's imagine they reply by email with a PDF attached. Now I've had some PDFs sent back which are scans of the email, printed out with handwritten answers on. The largest was 14MB, but let's assume it's limited to 1MB each, that's 20GB of email response. Sorry, but my email account simply doesn't have that much capacity, not many organisations would allow that anyway. Again they don't properly identify themselves so you end up having to ask each one which school they are.

 

The typical response sent via my website is less than 10KB, saving on bandwidth and storage. When a school submits their response they get an immediate confirmation by email of the information they submitted, they can publish this if they wish.

 

As for the format of the response, a requester is allowed to specify the format, such as Word, Excel, PDF etc. If they public authority has that application and it is practical for the PA to provide the information in that format they should https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-freedom-of-information/receiving-a-request/ . Schools all have web browsers. The webform I provide is an HTML document which they have the application to handle (web browser). The only issue is whether or not my site might infect schools with malware and viruses. It won't, and I've had no reports of any schools suffering issues, but putting this aside, why don't schools have appropriate protection and employ appropriate policies to protect against the "nasty malicious" internet? Nor are these requests phishing attacks, it's obvious it's a FOI request, I'm not asking for any sensitive information, responses to FOI requests are public information anyway. There's no dodgy links, the domain is registered to me, everything is transparent.

 

How many of you have an old smartphone they no longer use? I have 2, plus a couple of old PCs and tablets. Why not reset one to factory settings and set up a free gmail account, forward the request to that device and respond on a device which has no sensitive data on it and isn't connected to the school network? You can use this to access any dodgy sites you wish, clean the device off afterwards and protecting your organisation in the process. What risk could you possibly be running then?

 

BTW I've had 4 responses from schools so far today.

[Achandler]

All the above is all to the requestors benefit and not to the organisation providing the information. Not having an appropiate sized email account for free is not really the public bodies problem, that is the requestors issue, they didn't out of noone send the account a mass of unrequested emails.

 

I agree in principle with the FOIA and your request might be legitmate, but I assure you there is a mass of requests from IT suppliers etc as well, all taking up time for staff to process and deal with, costing money to deal with. I don't like the general requests sent to everyone because of the time taken to deal with them, and for example there is some evidenace that the FOIA in the pass to deliberately delay things.

 

As I said, there is two sides to all these requests. I feel you are taking it a little personally that people haven't replied to your request because the ICO said it didn't meet the required standards, maybe they are using it as an excuse not to reply, I don't know to be honest. They can be as picky as they want though, as I said make it so they have to reply if you want to force them to.

[mavhc]

a) why do you need to ask 20000 schools, just do a sample

b) costs even more for all those 20000 schools to process, gather and send the information to you than it does for you to send out the requests

c) a more general question, why isn't this all centralised, so the question and the answers are recorded and publically available for all? The central body could even do the sampling for you, host forms and gather the data too

[bmaloney]

All the above is all to the requestors benefit and not to the organisation providing the information. Not having an appropiate sized email account for free is not really the public bodies problem, that is the requestors issue, they didn't out of noone send the account a mass of unrequested emails.

 

I agree in principle with the FOIA and your request might be legitmate, but I assure you there is a mass of requests from IT suppliers etc as well, all taking up time for staff to process and deal with, costing money to deal with. I don't like the general requests sent to everyone because of the time taken to deal with them, and for example there is some evidenace that the FOIA in the pass to deliberately delay things.

You need to take this up with Parliament, they made the law. They have recently reviewed the FOIA because organisations have been complaining about the cost, but they decided to keep it as is.

 

You make it sound as if I'm actually making the job of public authorities difficult. If schools had to respond by post it would take more time and cost more money. If they made a mistake which resulted in letters back and forth it would cost more and take more time. How am I making things difficult for schools? I've set out the questions clearly and concisely, I've linked to the relevant legislation and guidance, I've provided an easy means of responding, including a confirmation for the school that they've responded, which they can keep as evidence for their audit trail, what exactly is the objection here? The argument about what constitutes an address applies to public authorities as it does to individuals making requests, public authorities, including government departments, consider a webform as an address for correspondence, why can't individuals, particularly as Facebook and Twitter are accepted as addresses for correspondence according to the FOIA.

 

I've receive a further 4 responses since my last post and one refusal, all via my webform.

[enjay]

As for the format of the response, a requester is allowed to specify the format, such as Word, Excel, PDF etc. If they public authority has that application and it is practical for the PA to provide the information in that format they should https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-freedom-of-information/receiving-a-request/ . Schools all have web browsers.

 

True, but... also from the page you linked to come the words "To be valid under the Act, the request must ... include an address for correspondence. This need not be the person’s residential or work address – it can be any address at which you can write to them, including a postal address or email address". As I understand it, you didn't provide this. You provided a means of submitting the information but not a means of corresponding (defined by the dictionaries I've just checked as an exchange of messages, a two-way process) with you.

 

Okay, time for a co-operative response. I see your earlier comment about the time involved and people responding in a variety of ways. Perhaps some of this is because your preferred method wasn't valid so they improvised, and some of it is because people don't always follow instructions. So... send out a template form in a Word Document and ask for that to be sent back via email. When you get a response, if you can copy-and-paste it into your database, do so; if you can't, put it to one side for now. If you get enough cop-and-pasteable responses to do some decent analysis, then great, just ignore the other ones. If you don't get enough appropriately-formatted responses, either a) type the data yourself from the other responses (or employ some people to do this for you if you have the means) or b) go back to those respondents and say "thanks for replying but would you mind doing it like this" or c) go back to those who didn't respond and remind them of their legal obligation to do so.

 

As for cost of storage which you mention, a Word Document is a few hundred KB. Even if every secondary school were to respond, that would be 200KB x 20,000 schools = 4,000,000KB = 4GB. A free Google Mail account can accommodate that.

Edited March 5, 2018 by enjay

[elsiegee40]

Google forms is a good way of collecting responses straight into a spreadsheet

https://www.google.co.uk/forms/about/

 

Set up a gmail account which people can also use for correspondence and you have a data collection method that doesn’t involve using a website that people don’t trust. I believe you get 15GB of data free.

 

100GB costs £15.99 per year(or £1.59 a month), 1TB costs £79.99 a year (or £7.99 a month), should you need to upgrade.

 

With a list of questions this long, I would provide the questions in the email too. This would make it easier for the school to prepare all the answers and have them ready to copy and paste into the form in one go.

Edited March 5, 2018 by elsiegee40

[bmaloney]

True, but... also from the page you linked to come the words "To be valid under the Act, the request must ... include an address for correspondence. This need not be the person’s residential or work address – it can be any address at which you can write to them, including a postal address or email address". As I understand it, you didn't provide this. You provided a means of submitting the information but not a means of corresponding (defined by the dictionaries I've just checked as an exchange of messages, a two-way process) with you.

 

Okay, time for a co-operative response. I see your earlier comment about the time involved and people responding in a variety of ways. Perhaps some of this is because your preferred method wasn't valid so they improvised, and some of it is because people don't always follow instructions. So... send out a template form in a Word Document and ask for that to be sent back via email. When you get a response, if you can copy-and-paste it into your database, do so; if you can't, put it to one side for now. If you get enough cop-and-pasteable responses to do some decent analysis, then great, just ignore the other ones. If you don't get enough appropriately-formatted responses, either a) type the data yourself from the other responses (or employ some people to do this for you if you have the means) or b) go back to those respondents and say "thanks for replying but would you mind doing it like this" or c) go back to those who didn't respond and remind them of their legal obligation to do so.

 

As for cost of storage which you mention, a Word Document is a few hundred KB. Even if every secondary school were to respond, that would be 200KB x 20,000 schools = 4,000,000KB = 4GB. A free Google Mail account can accommodate that.

An address for correspondence is not limited to a postal or email address, this is a misconception. You can also make a FOI request via Facebook or Twitter using your username on those platforms, this has been accepted by the ICO. Their objection is my website is not well known for making FOI requests. With 4,000 schools having provided responses, I argue it is well known.

 

You could make your request by Fax or SMS message or Whatsapp if the school had an account, as long as it's in writing and can be used for subsequent referral.

 

If I sent out a Word document as an attachment I bet schools would refuse to open the attachment on the basis it may contain viruses, or print it out, fill it in, scan it and send it back as a PDF. I'm not saying they're doing that to be awkward, but that was suggested by one of the posters earlier in this thread. Somerset LA even put a disclaimer in their emails saying they've made best endeavours to ensure any attachements are free of viruses, but the recipient must take responsibility for any loss suffered as a result of there being viruses in the attachment.

Edited March 5, 2018 by bmaloney

[FN-GM]

Google forms is a good way of collecting responses straight into a spreadsheet

https://www.google.co.uk/forms/about/

 

Set up a gmail account which people can also use for correspondence and you have a data collection method that doesn’t involve using a website that people don’t trust. I believe you get 15GB of data free.

 

100GB costs £1.59 a month, 1TB costs £7.99 a month, should you need to upgrade.

 

With a list of questions this long, I would provide the questions in the email too. This would make it easier for the school to prepare all the answers and have them ready to copy and paste into the form in one go.

 

Just to add. Google Forms, Sheets, Docs and Slides doesn't count towards your quota so you don't even need upgrades if you're using the Google formats.

[enjay]

An address for correspondence is not limited to a postal or email address, this is a misconception.

 

Never said it was. I said a webform is not a method of correspondence because it is a one-way process.

 

You can also make a FOI request via Facebook or Twitter using your username on those platforms, this has been accepted by the ICO.

 

Yes, as I said earlier - you can MAKE a request however you want (as long as it is in writing) but we might not be able to respond via that method. That said, if you gave us a Twitter or Facebook contact details, we would at least have a means of corresponding so your request might be valid!

 

If you'd given an email address and asked people to complete the webform, I suspect others would be happy.

 

I will accept, however, some people might be looking for a reason to refuse. I'm not defending or criticising that, but please do consider schools get lots of FOI requests, some very lengthy, some complex to fill out, some containing information which is already publicly available, and some clearly from sales companies trying to work out how much to charge for a product. Responding to yours would be quite time-consuming as it would require the involvement of several different people, and some of it would need compiling manually. This could be why

 

Can I ask the relevance of questions 7-13 by the way? Are you trying to prove/find out if there is a correlation between the gender of the support staff and the school's policy regarding separated parents?

 

Some of your questions are slightly flawed too, I think. I think I said this earlier in the thread, but you ask if there are students where we only have the mother on file and yes, we do have some students in that situation. This is not, however, because we are failing to fulfil our legal obligation towards a separated father but because the father is dead. Our answer to that would therefore distort your statistics.

[bmaloney]

c) a more general question, why isn't this all centralised, so the question and the answers are recorded and publically available for all? The central body could even do the sampling for you, host forms and gather the data too

 

Indeed, good question. Schools have to report all sorts of data about their pupils, including if their parents are in the Armed Forces. It would be very easy for the data to include how many parents are registered. It would also help a lot if SIMS and other pupil data systems were actually configured to account for separated parents, after all it is a legal requirement to treat all parents equally, why IT suppliers don't account for this is a mystery.

[elsiegee40]

Your questions seem to be orientated around natural parents. However, adopted children and look after children will almost certainly not come with this information. Nor should they. Natural parents do not automatically have rights.