Dear Department for Education,

Please supply all information you hold on any Common Law duty of care owed by higher education providers to their students, that was used to generate your response to a recent parliamentary petition calling for a statutory duty of care in higher education. This may include electronic and paper records, drafts, emails, letters, notes, minutes of meetings, material downloaded from the internet, advice, correspondence, photographs and sound or video recordings

Yours faithfully,

Gillian Green

Dear Department for Education,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Department for Education's handling of my FOI request 'Universities have a general duty of care to their students'.

Dear Higher Education Briefing Team

Thank you for your letter dated 31 August 2023. Ref: FOI 2023-0027857

I hereby request that your limited response and decision to withhold information be considered by an independent review panel, who were not involved in the original consideration of my request.

The scope of my request has been very narrowly interpreted. Under FOIA, any information, documentation or records that are created by, or in the possession of a public authority may be covered by the scope of a request and are liable for disclosure. Any information which has been created or used in connection with the activities of the authority at the time a request is received is considered held and subject to disclosure. It is irrelevant who created the information, where it originated or who owns it.

Put simply, anything in a permanent recorded format (for example, video, audio recordings, handwritten reports, notes, emails, minutes) that is related to the process of generating your official departmental response to the petition in question should have been provided. Most of your internal records will not be “privileged” client-lawyer exchanges or material. They would not be covered by S.42 and should have been supplied. These records clearly exist since in your reply you were able to report that “Some of the information is not held by the department, including information taken from legal sources such as webpages on Lexis Nexis and Practical Law.” How else would you know that?

The provision of certain records has also been refused. S.42 is a qualified exemption. Even if the ‘Legal Professional Privilege’ exemption is engaged, such information can only be withheld if the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosure. It is in the public interest for public authorities to be accountable for the quality of their decision-making, and for them to be able to demonstrate that decisions have been made on the basis of high-quality legal advice. Transparency in the decision-making process and access to the information on which decisions have been based facilitate that accountability. Listing just the more important factors in favour of disclosure on this occasion:

1. Many young lives are being put at risk, estimated at 100 deaths per annum.
2. Large number of people affected. There are 2.8 million students in Higher Education.
3. The absence of litigation, since no relevant legal case against the government is involved.
4. Lack of transparency in the government’s actions and reasoning. No legal authority is cited.
5. Potential misrepresentation of advice that was given. It contradicts a recent court judgment.
6. Furthering public debate: 128K people petitioned Parliament, and their request was denied.

The enormous public interest in disclosing such information clearly outweighs the public interest in maintaining the exemption, and is all the stronger in this case because the opinion is still live.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/u...

Yours faithfully,

Gillian Green

Dear ACCOUNT, Unmonitored,

Thank you for conducting an internal review. I will make the necessary modifications to my original request. Hopefully that should help make everything clearer. Please supply a copy of anything related to the parliamentary petition calling for a statutory duty of care in higher education that is held in a permanent recorded format (for example, video, audio recordings, handwritten reports, notes, emails, minutes).

Yours sincerely,

Gillian Green

Dear ACCOUNT, Unmonitored,

Ref: 2023-0035868

Thank you for your letter of 26th October.

Please restrict my request to the months of:
a) November 2022
b) December 2022
c) January 2023

(I believe I may have made an error earlier, using the incorrect link to reply and maybe incorrectly using a new FOI request. Apologies!)

Yours sincerely

Gillian Green