Independent education reform review panel payments: FOI release

Information requested

The salaries/fees/expenses paid to Ken Muir and the panel members that came from tax payer’s money for the independent education reform review.

Response

With regard to the expert panel members, I can confirm they were not paid any salaries or fees for their time. The full list of panel members were:

• Billy Burke, Head Teacher, Renfrew High School
• Professor Graham Donaldson, University of Glasgow
• Professor Louise Hayward, University of Glasgow
• Professor Walter Humes, University of Stirling
• Professor Anne Looney, Dublin City University
• Khadija Mohammed, University of the West of Scotland/Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators
• Cathy McCulloch, Children's Parliament
• Dr Naomi Stanford, Naomi Stanford Organisation Design

All meetings of the expert panel were held virtually but plans were made to hold a face to face meeting in Edinburgh during the month of December. This was subsequently cancelled and reverted to online at very short notice due to heightened concern and public health advice associated with Omicron. Two of the panel members incurred associated expenses due to cancelled flights and train travel for which they were reimbursed. Details as follows:

• Professor Anne Looney was paid £128.29 for expenses incurred due to cancelled flights to/from Dublin
• Dr Naomi Stanford was paid £85.10 for expenses incurred due to cancelled train tickets to/from London

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide details of Professor Muir's remuneration because an exemption under section s.38(1)(b) (personal information) of FOISA applies to that information. The reason for this is because it relates to personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) ofthe General Data Protection Regulation and in  section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

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