Tutoring

I have taught in some form for as long as I have worked. Most of it comes out of what I was already doing — the FOI training grew out of my own casework, the data-journalism guides out of stories I was reporting, and the tutoring started with the science degree and never quite stopped. Three strands, below.

The method is the same every time. Take the exemption the authority has claimed and break it into the tests it has to pass, then show them failing. Did they follow the process the Act sets out for refusing a request? Does the information really fit the legal description of the exemption they have named? Have they shown, with evidence, that disclosure would cause the harm they claim? And does the public interest in the information outweigh that harm anyway? Four questions, asked in that order, against each exemption in turn. Most refusals fail at least two of them.

The craft underneath that is about records rather than law. Never ask a question — ask for the documents that would let you answer it yourself. If an authority has published a summary table, there is a database underneath it, and you should be asking for the database. Understand how a public body generates, files and audits its paperwork and you can name the thing you want instead of describing it, which is the difference between a request that gets answered and a request that gets refused on cost.

The written material runs the whole arc. A course in five parts, from starting out through to preparing a serious request; a three-part sequence on writing requests — the basic request, how to ask for the right information, and how to write a request the authority will fight; and standalone guides on the section 12 cost limit and on how and why to appeal a refusal. Alongside those sit worked examples taken from real casework: full request-and-appeal cycles on a council’s arm’s-length company, a fracking licence application, an NHS operational plan, and a contested internal review that takes apart section 35 and section 36 refusals with tribunal caselaw. The teaching decks run to about 120 slides each and are built for a half-day workshop; the version I use with students breaks three times for practical work — work out what you want and who holds it, write the request, then appeal the refusal.

I have taught this material to journalism students at the University of the West of England, at the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s summer school in 2015 and 2016, in a workshop for the Bristol Cable, at a workshop in Birmingham in 2016, and in sessions with campaign groups working live investigations of their own.

The scraping guide takes you from a website with a lot of similar pages to a clean dataset; the spreadsheets guide covers the unglamorous half, cleaning and splitting messy fields, then the parts that find stories — conditional formatting to spot the outliers, COUNTIF, and pivot tables. Both are built round real datasets and both were written for reporters rather than analysts.

The mentoring itself has mostly been project-shaped rather than course-shaped: sitting down with someone who has a live investigation and turning what they want to know into questions, then turning the questions into documents that exist and can be asked for. That is the whole of it, really — a hypothesis, the paperwork that would prove or disprove it, and a request for the paperwork. I have done that with campaign groups working on energy and on planning, and written the requests up with them in the room.

I’ve also written subject-access and data-protection material for people making requests about themselves rather than about government, including a worked SAR for a campaigner in a planning dispute — when a SAR is the better instrument than an FOI, and, just as often, when it isn’t worth the cost of sending one.

The two halves of that are less separate than they look. Most of what I do at A-level is the same thing I do in an FOI workshop — work out what the question is actually asking for, find out where the answer is kept, and write it down in the order that makes it land.

I take on a small amount of teaching and training work alongside everything else. If any of it is useful to you, get in touch.