Prepared internally, no external costs.
Numbers of confirmed covid-19 cases in schools are published daily on the following page:
However, historic data broken down by school is not available online. Please can you provide me with daily numbers of new confirmed cases in schools, reproducing those published on the above page, for each day since 1 September 2021.
I would like to receive the data in the format of a spreadsheet with the following columns:
For example, for the statistics relating to 1 February 2022, Grainville had 15 pupils and one member of staff. I would expect to see the following data on one row:
01/02/2022
Grainville
15
1
16
Original Response
The data requested is extensive and would need to be extracted from various sources and manipulated. Aside from taking more than the prescribed 12.5 hours to do that work, the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 does not require a Scheduled Public Authority to manipulate data in order to provide a response. Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has therefore been applied.
Article applied
Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive
A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.
Internal Review Request
In order to collate the weekly statistics which data back to 6th September, and indeed conduct any internal analysis across schools, I find it difficult to understand how this data has not already been collated into a single source, in which case the requested data would likely be easy to extract.
Nonetheless, after weekends and bank holidays have been taken into account, as at the date of request, there were only 85 school days in the requested period (now 107, given the time taken to reply). These have been published each day on gov.je, and therefore all of the requested information has at some point been in the public domain. I would imagine that in order for each day’s data to be transcribed from its source to the relevant web page, it would need to be presented to whoever is doing that in a standard format, perhaps a text file, e-mail or spreadsheet. In order to support the weekly statistics, I would also make a guess that this data is within its retention schedule and is still held. I also find it difficult to understand how, even in the case of the most basic filing system, it would take more than 12.5 hours to find and include the 85/107 sets of data into a zip file or similar.
Accepting that there is no requirement for manipulation of data to serve a request, I would be happy to receive the individual 85/107 updates as individual files and collate the data myself. Once in the format presented on the website, it would take me 5-10 minutes to add a few columns in Excel to split out the necessary information and then present that in a pivot table to align with my requested format, regardless of the number of days included.
Internal Review Response
This review has been completed by two senior staff members of the Government of Jersey, independent of the original decision-making process.
The original response has been reviewed and assessed to identify whether the application of the exemption had been applied correctly.
The reviewers considered that at the time the response was completed, from information they were provided with to assist in the decision-making process for this Internal Review, the application of the Article 16 exemption was appropriate and should be upheld.
Although the Scheduled Public Authority had not identified that they could provide the information, as a result of this Internal Review request, further enquiries were made across Government and copies of the web page updates have been obtained and are attached in their raw form.
It should be noted that under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 there is no requirement to provide information held in a specified format.
Web Pages Zip Folder
gov.je