Teacher attendance and absence for Hautlieu since the September 2024 (FOI)

Original ​Request 696266992

I would like to see the data held for teacher attendance and absence for Hautlieu School since the September 2024 school term to date. With particular emphasis on specialist teachers attended their classes and where either no teacher has been present or a non specialist has covered.

For clarification “specialist teachers, I mean the teacher that is assigned to teacher that class and is appropriately qualified to do so. For example, someone assigned to teacher a psychology class would be a specialist and if they are unable to do so and a qualified music teacher is covering that class in their absence then that teacher is unqualified for that role.

Original Response

The Department has determined that to identify specialist teacher absence and those attending their classes and where either no teacher has been present or a non-specialist has covered would require extraction and manipulation of data to produce the new information.

A Scheduled Public Authority is not required to manipulate and create new data sets. It has been estimated that the cost of extracting the data would exceed the cost limit provisions set out in the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014. Therefore Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 applies.

Article applied

Article 3 - Meaning of “information held by a public authority”

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a)     it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b)     it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.​

Internal Review Request  

I am 100% sure the cost is minimal and the records are essentially already held and my request is being penalised / denied out of convenience.

That said, perhaps you could ask for an amendment to the request and list the percentage of classes not attended or taught by the assigned teacher.

This information i.e. teacher absence etc, must be to hand and if not then there is a far bigger administrative issue. 

Please can you act, based on the above? Thank you 

Internal Review Response   

This internal review has been conducted by an official of appropriate seniority who has not been involved in the original decision. As part of their review, they will be expected to understand the reasons behind the original response, impartially determine whether the response should be revised, and how so, considering the request and the information held, any relevant exemptions, or other relevant matters under the Law.    

The Internal Review Panel was asked to review the original response and confirm the following:   

Does the FOI request relate to a body to which the Law applies, or information held by a body covered by the Law?    

If the answer is no, all the other questions are not applicable.        

Further questions if above is a yes:    

i. Was the right information searched for and reviewed?  

ii. Was the information supplied appropriately? 

iii. Was information appropriately withheld in accordance with the articles applied and were the public interest test/ prejudice test properly applied?  

Following discussion, it was agreed by the Panel that the application of Article 3 was applied appropriately and the decision to apply has been upheld. However, the application of the article within the FOI requires amended wording as follows:

A Scheduled Public Authority is not required to manipulate and create new data sets; therefore Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 applies.

The department have provided further information regarding teacher absence:

In the event of unplanned or short-term teacher absence in secondary schools, it is the norm that, due to limited available capacity, teacher absence is covered by staff who are unlikely to share the specialism of the absent teacher. In the event of a long-term absence every effort will be made to either employ a subject specialist or to re-deploy existing subject teachers to ensure that the impact of the absence is minimised and does not disproportionately impact one group or year group at the expense of another.

For classes in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 all classes whose teacher is absent will be covered by another member of staff. In the sixth form, unexpected or short-term absence may not be covered by a teacher (unless capacity is available), rather students are likely to be set private study work to complete independently. However, long term teacher absence will be addressed in a similar way to Key Stage 3 or Key Stage 4, including the possible redeployment of subject specialists internally.