Number of concerns and requests to withdraw the guidance Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools: FOI Review

Information requested

Original request: 202500491766

Please supply details of all concerns logged with the Scottish Government and requests made to withdraw the Scottish Government guidance Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools. Please provide copies of all letters and petitions sent to the Scottish Government.

Response

Further to my acknowledgement letters of the 8 and 23 December 2025, I have now completed my Review of our response to your request (202500491766) under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA) where you asked for: “all concerns logged with the Scottish Government and requests made to withdraw the Scottish Government guidance Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools, including copies of all letters and petitions sent to the Scottish Government.

I have been asked to review your request, to decide whether the original response should be confirmed, with or without modifications, as appropriate, or a fresh decision be substituted. I can confirm that I was not involved in the handling or decision-making around the original response. I have considered this case again, and have conducted a comprehensive review of the response, the searches undertaken and the information available.

In accordance with section 21(4) of Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, I have reached a decision on your request.

I have concluded that the original decision should be confirmed, with modifications.

Firstly, I have considered the searches that were specifically completed in response to your request. You should note that as no specific date was provided we interpreted your request where you referred to the withdrawal of “Scottish Government guidance supporting transgender pupils in schools” to cover the time period from the 1 April 2025 to the 2 November 2025 (the date of your request), as this aligned to the period of time including the Supreme Court Judgement and the Judicial Review of Scottish Borders Council. This means that we searched for any information held between 1 April 2025 and the 2 November 2025. In the Annex to your Response Letter, nine documents were provided of which documents 2 and 8 were a duplicate.

In reviewing your request, we have established that further information was held and we are now releasing information (in the form of a further 10 documents). However, some of that information remains exempt from disclosure under the following exemption:

An exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party, e.g. names/contact details of individuals, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the 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.

Please find enclosed, in the attached Annex to this letter, most of the additional information that was found as part of this Review.

About FOI

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

FOI 202500496350 - Information released - Annex

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