Wednesday 04 December 2019
Every member of the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture has disclosed emails, notes and other documents they hold in connection with the review of the appointment of the Head of Curriculum and Standards which was made earlier this year.
In accordance with data protection requirements, all members of the Committee have given their unqualified permission for the information they hold to be used for the purposes of the Scrutiny Management Committee's review of the appointment.
Committee members have submitted the papers to the Office of the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture and States' lawyers. They have been submitted with no omissions or redactions.
Deputy Matt Fallaize, President of the CfESC, said:
"Since the SMC announced its review we have been eager to provide everything we hold and to redact or omit nothing. The week before last I wrote to the President of the Scrutiny Management Committee, Deputy Chris Green, asking him to identify an officer of the SMC or a reviewer to whom our full set of unredacted papers could be provided. The SMC has not yet identified how this could be done in a way which is lawful and in particular does not breach data protection legislation or the employers' duty of confidentiality to employees.
"Therefore, mindful of the SMC's deadline for the papers to be submitted, we provided them to officers at the Office of the CfESC and to the Law Officers who are completely independent of the Committee. The lawyers' advice is that the papers need to be redacted because some participants - not members of the Committee but others - have not given permission for their personal data to be disclosed for the purposes of the SMC review. Therefore the Law Officers have kindly offered to work through our papers and make the necessary redactions so that we can at least submit everything we hold in a lawful way even if at the present time the SMC can't advise us how to submit them in an unredacted form.
"We hope to receive the redacted papers imminently and then we will submit them to the SMC, but we will still work with the SMC to try and find a way of submitting them in an unredacted way. We have nothing to hide and we would rather every word of every email and every document be available to the SMC's reviewer. If a way can be found to do this we can provide the unredacted papers immediately because they have been held at the Office of the CfESC for nearly two weeks."
