
Business Assurance
5th Floor
Information
James Clerk Maxwell Building
Compliance
57 Waterloo Road
London
SE1 8WA
Tel: 020 7848 7816
Email:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxx.xx.xx
John Kay
By email only to: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
12 February 2019
Dear John,
Request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”)
Further to your recent request for information held by King’s Col ege London, I am writing
to confirm that the requested information is held by the university.
Your request
We received your information request on 6 February 2019 and have treated it as a request
for information made under section 1(1) of the Act.
You requested the following information:
Can you please give the number of applications and number of offers for every postgraduate course at KCL
for 2015-2016, 2016-2017, 2017-2018, 2018-2019.
Our response
Please find attached document. This data includes applications and offers for Postgraduate
Taught programmes for the fol owing years of entry: 2015/6, 2016/7, 2017/8 and 2018/9.
Non-Award, Non-Credit and Free-Standing Module programmes have been excluded.
Please note some programmes may be new for recent years, or may no longer run,
therefore there wil be no historical data.
Where the total number of individuals is under 5, the university has replaced the figure
with ‘equal to or less than five’ (≤5). The university considers that it is reasonably likely
that students could be identified from the low numbers. Such identification would
constitute a breach of one of the principles set out in the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).
This approach is in accordance with the Information Commissioner’s Office Code of
Practice on Anonymisation. This information is therefore exempt from disclosure under
section 40(2) of the Act. This is an absolute exemption which means that the university
does not need to consider the public interest in disclosing the information, we only need to
establish that the exemption has been engaged.
The methodology the university has adopted is a variation of the HESA standard rounding
and suppression method. Numbers that are five or fewer are replaced with “≤5 (less than or
equal to five).
Full details of the HESA methodology can be found on their website:
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/about/regulation/data-protection/rounding-and-
suppression-anonymise-statistics
This completes the university’s response to your information request.
Your right to complain
If you are unhappy with the service, you have received in relation to your information
request or feel that it has not been properly handled you have the right to complain or request
a review of our decision by contacting the Assistant Director of Business Assurance
(Information Compliance) within 60 days of the date of this letter.
Further information about our internal complaints procedure is available at the link below:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/col ege/policyzone/assets/files/governance_and_legal/Freedom_of
_Information_Policy_updated_Oct_%202011.pdf
If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint you may apply to the Information
Commissioner for a decision. General y, the Information Commissioner cannot make a
decision unless you have exhausted the internal complaints procedure provided by King’s
College London.
The Information Commissioner can be contacted at the following address:
The Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Yours sincerely
Jade Roche
Information Compliance