Dear Rakesh
Thank you for your email. We will respond to your request within 20 school
working days.
Kind regards
Mark Sturgeon
Chair
The Buckinghamshire Grammar Schools

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Dear Mr Bamane

Thank you for your email. We are unable to provide the information you
have requested concerning the Buckinghamshire Secondary Transfer Test in
September 2021 as the information requested is currently incomplete and as
stated on our website is not due to be published until Autumn 2022. The
information requested is therefore subject to a Section 22 (future
publication) exemption under the Freedom of Information Act.

Section 22 is a qualified exemption. This means that, even if the
requested information falls within it, the public authority must go on to
consider whether the public interest in maintaining the exemption is
greater than the public interest in disclosing the information. Where the
public interest is equally balanced, the authority must disclose the
requested information.

TBGS publishes a considerable amount of test data on the website for each
Secondary Transfer Test. This can be found on our website test data pages:
[1]https://www.thebucksgrammarschools.org/t.... The data sets are
produced for TBGS by our contracted Test Administrator, Buckinghamshire
Council at three stages in the annual testing process. The tests are
usually taken in September and we publish two sets of provisional data
just after results are released in October showing the number of children
who have taken the test, where they come from and the distribution of
scores. The following Spring we publish provisional information about how
many children have been allocated to each grammar school and which LA they
come from. Finally, in the Autumn that the children start at grammar
school we publish final data sets which confirm grammar school allocations
and locations and also separate pupil level data sets linking Secondary
Transfer Test Scores to feeder school, gender, ethnicity, weighted scores,
and date of birth.

The pupil level data is published in the Autumn a year after testing
because the data needed to generate the analysis is incomplete until after
the start of the Autumn term. A lot of children take the Buckinghamshire
Secondary Transfer Test, but the data is fluid until the end of the
process.

In considering whether it is in the public interest to release the
information requested for the test taken in September 2021, we took into
account the fact that the information that TBGS publishes on a routine
basis throughout the year is in the public interest (which is why it is
proactively published), but it is published at the point where it is
finalised so that a complete and accurate picture is provided.  We also
took account of the fact that releasing incomplete information could be
extremely misleading because changes in the data can be quite significant.
As TBGS cannot find any clear public interest in releasing the incomplete
data early, the public interest in withholding the data until the point at
which it is complete, accurate and has been reviewed outweighs any
arguments for release.

Kind regards

Mark Sturgeon
Chair
The Buckinghamshire Grammar Schools

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