Information relating to the Scottish Teachers’ Pension Scheme (STPS): FOI review

Information requested

Your request, reference 202100241071
1.Currently participate in, i.e. pay contributions to, the Scottish Teachers’ Pension Scheme (STPS)

2a. Have withdrawn from the STPS for future accrual, and

2b. their date of leaving

3a. Have notified SPPA of their intention to withdraw from the STPS at a future date.

Your request for review, reference 202100266659 
In summary, only 60 out of approximately 100 independent schools are listed as participating in the Scottish Teachers Pension Scheme (STPS) and whilst I know there isn’t 100% participation a quick spot check has identified at least one school that appears to be missing from the list, e.g. publicly available school annual reporting often confirms membership of the STPS as is the case with Fettes College, but they aren’t on your list.Therefore I believe the FOI request is incomplete or wrong and can’t be relied upon.

Response

You noted in your review request that you had emailed twice previously to query the response, but had not received a reply. I understand that you ‘replied all’ to casehandling.service@gov.scot which is not a monitored inbox for Freedom of Information reviews. Thank you for redirecting your review request to me and for your patience in awaiting a response.

Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Further investigation has determined that the SPPA’s internal classification of independent schools differs from the register published by the Scottish Government. We will work to tie these together going forward.

Regarding your question 2a: we have interpreted the request for details of schools that have “withdrawn from the STPS for future accrual” to mean schools that have stopped contributing and have withdrawn all funds from the scheme. If this is not an accurate interpretation of the question, please could you let me know at SPPAFOI@gov.scot and we will provide further information accordingly.

We have cross-referenced the previous list and the employers that currently contribute to STPS against the independent schools register. There were a number of independent schools categorised as colleges in our system that had been omitted; these have been identified in the attached revised list. Also identified in the attached list are employers that were included in the original response but do not feature on the Scottish Government register of independent schools, again due to a classification issue.

About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI202100266659 - Information released

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