Information on the closure of New School Butterstone: FOI release

Information requested

A) I wish to know what information was shared by the Independent Review into the closure of The New School, Butterstone to any third party. This includes but is not exclusive to:

1. The Scottish Ministers
2. Education Scotland
3. The Care Inspectorate
4. The Board of Governors of The New School, Butterstone.

B) I wish to know when the information submitted to the Independent Review was destroyed as was stated in the published guidelines.

Response

A) As you are aware the Independent Review into the Closure of the New School Butterstone was conducted independently from Government. At the outset it produced and publicised a privacy notice detailing how material would be handled. It also produced a publicly available report.

Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. The information you request is publicly available within the final report of the Independent Review: Closure of the New School Butterstone: independent review report . This sets out how information was collected by the Independent Review, stored, and then destroyed.

For your convenience the passages of the report which are directly relevant to your request are below:
“1.14 The report was shared with the Relevant Bodies, in confidence, on 27 May 2020 to allow for factchecking of the content. The final report was submitted to the Deputy First Minister on 10 June 2020.

1.17 The privacy policy for the Review was sent to all those who contributed and was publicly available on the Review webpage https://www.gov.scot/groups/new-school-butterstone-closure-independentreview/.

1.18 …. All of the material received was stored securely on dedicated, partitioned, restricted files on the Scottish Government's electronic filing system until the report was published. In addition, all
information received from former staff, pupils, parents, carers and organisations not listed as a relevant body was also stored using this secure system. All data was only accessible by myself and the Secretariat.

1.19 All of this material, electronic and hard copy, has now been destroyed appropriately, and only this final report has been retained. In addition, a duty of confidentiality remains in place for any member of the Review team in relation to information of a confidential nature.

1.20 The Review was not subject to requests made under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), but was subject to Subject Access Requests (SAR), which were processed if required. Neither of these requests were made of the Review during the period it was being conducted. Any FOISA or SAR requests made after the date of publication will now be looked at directly by the Relevant Body (as listed in Annex B) that it is most relevant to, now that the Review is concluded.”

B) For the complete avoidance of doubt my enquiries confirmed that destruction happened following publication.

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