Student voice within faculty

The request was refused by Goldsmiths, University of London.

Aodhán Eoín Ciarán mag Uidhir Broadchest

Dear Goldsmiths, University of London,

Pursuant to the FOI Act 2000 I request the following information

1. Minutes or notes of meetings of formal departmental or school student/faculty representative or liaison meetings for all UG and taught PG courses from 2011 academic year;

2. Amounts of financial resource exspensed, paid to, paid in kind or granted to any student society affiliated with academic departments and their courses since 2011 academic year; and

3. Student complaint topics made formally to the College since 2011 academic year.

Yours faithfully,

Aodhán Eoín Ciarán mag Uidhir Broadchest

Matthew Ramsey, Goldsmiths, University of London

Dear Aodhán Eoín Ciarán mag Uidhir Broadchest,

I am writing to formally acknowledge your Freedom of Information request received on 13 May 2016 in which you asked a number of questions regarding student/department liaison meetings, departmental financial support to societies and the topics of formal student complaints.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act we are exempt from responding to a request if to do so, would involve more than 18 hours to determine whether we hold the requested information, locate it, and retrieve and extract it. With respect to your request we consider that this 18 hour limit would be exceeded based on the following estimates and therefore consider we are exempt from responding to your request in its current form.

Notes or minutes of a particular departmental student liaison meetings

These are not held centrally but at departmental level. Each department have their own filing systems and these may have changed over the five period in question. We estimate that to determine whether we hold a copy of the notes or minutes of a particular departmental meeting, locate and retrieve them would take approximately 20 minutes. Therefore if we were to devote the entire 18 hours to departmental minutes, we would likely be able to provide 54 sets. We don't have a precise number of the set of minutes/ notes we hold (given the distributed nature of how they are stored) but Goldsmiths has over 20 departments and the meetings you are interested in take place each term. Over the five year period in question, we are likely to hold several hundred sets.

Topics of complaints

We do not maintain a register of the topics on which we receive formal complaints from students. To provide this information would involve reviewing each individual complaint file to ascertain the nature of the complaint. We estimate that this would take approximately 20 minutes per complaint. Therefore if we devoted the entire 18 hour limit to this question, we would be able to review around 54 complaints and prepare a breakdown of the topics.

You are entitled to refine your request (based on these estimates) so that it does not involve more than 18 hours work. In accordance with the Information Commissioner's guidance, if you choose to do so, we will treat this as a new request.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew

Matthew Ramsey
Information Governance Policies & Project Officer

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