Our second FOIA request to the Department for Education and Skills requests more information on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, which seems to be conducted in many countries at the same time and compares the educational standards of 15 year olds.
According to a suggestion on this website, it appears that the UK or at least England may have pulled out of this study. Certainly getting information about the UK involvement with PISA cannot be done at present from what is published on the DfES website.
The DfES instructions for sending in requests say that they should be marked in bold thus:
PUBLICATIONS SCHEME REQUEST
Our second request to the Department for Education and Skills:
PUBLICATIONS SCHEME REQUEST Public Enquiry Unit Department for Education and Skills Castle View House, East Lane Runcorn WA7 2GJCopy sent by email: info@dfes.gsi.gov.uk
Microsoft Word format attachment: dfes_foia_2.docSunday 23rd January 2005
PUBLICATIONS SCHEME REQUEST
Freedom of Information Act 2000
Formal Request for InformationDear Sir or Madam
Please provide me with the following information:
1. All emails, notes, business cases, project proposals, minutes of meetings and reports pertaining to exactly what information was made available to the OECD for the recent educational benchmarking (PISA) study http://www.pisa.oecd.org2. All emails, notes, business cases, project proposals, minutes of meetings and reports pertaining to how the decision was taken to pull England out of the study
Please provide the information ideally by publishing it on your public world wide website, or alternatively by email.
In the unlikely event that this information is not already available in a standard electronic format, then please explain the reasons why, when you provide the information in another format.
If you are proposing to make a charge for providing the information requested, please provide full details in advance, together with an explanation of any proposed charge
If you decide to withhold any of the information requested you should clearly explain why you have done so in your response, by reference to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 legislation. If your decision to withhold is based upon an evaluation of the public interest, then you should clearly explain which public interests you have considered, and why you have decided that the public interest in maintaining the exception(s) outweighs the public interest in releasing the information.
I look forward to receiving the information requested as soon as possible and in any event within 20 working days of receipt. i.e. by Tuesday 15th February 2005
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
If you require any clarification of this request please contact me as soon as possible.
Yours sincerelyemail:
mobile phone:
The DfES email system does seem to honour Read Receipts and our email seems to have been read today, Monday 24th January.