We asked five questions. Here is what came back.

The clock was stopped for the summer holidays

The response period will therefore be paused during the school closure period and will resume when the school reopens on 1 September 2026.

There is no provision in data protection law that pauses a subject access request because an organisation is closed. The clock can be paused for two reasons: while identity is being verified, and while a reasonable question about scope is outstanding. Holidays, closures and staff absence are not on that list.

The Trust already had both of those grounds available to it. It did not need a third. It used one anyway.

Prove who you are — to the school that has been emailing you

The Trust held the request pending proof of identity and parental responsibility.

The parent was already in live email correspondence with the school. They are addressed by name in every letter. The request concerns a referral the school itself made about their child, six days earlier.

Identity checks exist for genuine doubt, and they are supposed to be proportionate. There was no doubt here. What the demand produced was delay.

“We do not hold that” — and then they held it

The school does not hold a recorded breakdown showing the total funds raised through each school event, school sale or fundraising activity…

Three paragraphs later, in the same letter:

I can confirm that for the accounting period the total raised was £6832.31. Of which £2,641 was provided to Action Aid.

A figure stated to the penny is a figure somebody looked up. The records exist, and they were interrogated to produce that number.

“Not held” and “£6,832.31” cannot both be true of the same accounts — and “not held” is the answer this Trust reaches for more than any other.

Where did the other £4,191.31 go?

£6,832.31 was raised. £2,641 went to ActionAid — 38.7 per cent of it.

The letter says nothing at all about the remaining £4,191.31. Not where it went, not what it bought, not who decided.

That is not a refusal. A refusal would at least name a reason and give us something to appeal. This is silence, and it is the simplest unanswered question on this page.

Sent to documents that do not contain the answer

The Trust relied on the exemption for information “reasonably accessible by other means”, pointing the parent towards Companies House and Get Information About Schools.

Trust-level statutory accounts do not record what a school bake sale took. Sending a parent to a document that cannot answer their question is not accessibility. It is a redirection, and the exemption does not stretch that far.

Nobody offered to help us ask a better question

The real objection is effort. The money is recorded by ledger code and cost centre, not event by event. Fine — that is a normal problem, and there is a proper route for it: refuse on cost, then help the requester reshape the request into something the school would answer.

That duty to advise and assist is a legal obligation, not a courtesy.

Across four freedom of information replies, not one narrower alternative was ever offered. Not once, on any of the requests, on any point.

The claim was given. The proof was withheld.

The school confirms that 100% of current teaching and pupil-facing staff have completed up-to-date safeguarding training.

In the very next section of the same letter, the training matrix and the compliance logs — the only records that could show whether that is true — were refused as staff personal data.

Data protection protects personal information. It does not protect whole filing cabinets. A table of roles, required courses and completion dates, with the names taken out, is not anybody’s personal data.

Redaction was available and straightforward. Blanket refusal was chosen instead, and the figure stays unverifiable by design.

An answer that answers nothing

If the school does not hold a separate internal version of this document, then no further recorded information is held by the school for this part of the request.

The law requires a public body to say whether it holds something. That is the first duty in the Act, before any question of disclosure arises.

“If we do not have it, then we do not have it” is a circle, not a reply. It reads like a sentence written by somebody who never went and looked.

There is no safeguarding records audit. At all.

The school does not hold a standalone document titled “Safeguarding Records Audit”.

Safeguarding, we are told, is “subject to monitoring and review through internal school and Trust safeguarding oversight arrangements”.

But that monitoring leaves behind no dated document, no recorded outcome, nothing anyone can point at.

If there is no record that a safeguarding audit happened, then no governor, no parent and no inspector can confirm one ever did. Oversight that leaves no trace cannot be checked, cannot be challenged, and cannot be relied on when it matters most.

A warning shot, for asking four questions

…where requests are repeated, overlapping, excessive, or impose a disproportionate burden, the school may consider the relevant provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The Trust did not use the vexatious-request provisions. It mentioned them. Then it mentioned them again, almost word for word, in the next reply.

The threshold for calling a request vexatious is high, and it is meant to be about the request, not about a parent’s persistence. Four questions in six days, from a parent whose child had just been referred to social care, is not a campaign of harassment. It is a frightened parent using the rights Parliament gave them.

Putting that sentence in a letter to that parent does one thing. It makes them think twice before sending a fifth.

Of everything on this page, that is the sentence that tells you what they think of parents.

It does not exist — and we are withholding it

The Trust said the data was not held. It then withheld the same data under two separate exemptions.

You cannot keep back something that does not exist. Claiming both at once is what an authority does when it wants the answer to be no whichever way you push — and it is a pattern the Information Commissioner has criticised before.

Exemptions used with no reason given

Two of the exemptions relied on are conditional. The Trust has to weigh them against the public interest and explain why secrecy wins. That explanation is not optional; a refusal notice is legally required to contain it.

No public interest test appears anywhere, in any of the four replies.

The exemptions are hedged, too — “where applicable”, “to the extent applicable”, “may rely on”. A refusal has to say which exemption covers which information. Gesturing at a list of them is not a refusal at all.

Even one number a year was too much

We accept part of this one, and we want to be plain about it. In a single primary school, safeguarding figures broken down by year, category, gender and ethnicity really could point at individual children. Small numbers identify people. That objection is real and we are not going to argue with it.

It has nothing whatever to do with the total number of referrals to Slough Children First each year. One figure. Several hundred pupils. It identifies nobody.

That was refused too — the strongest possible objection applied to the weakest possible case.

A signature nobody wrote down

…the Board of Directors had allocated the responsibility for approving this policy to the CEO… the Trust does not hold a separate voting record, resolution, chair’s action, or electronic approval record.

The child protection policy governing every school in the Trust was approved by one person, with:

• no vote
• no board resolution
• no chair’s action record
• no electronic approval record
• and no involvement from the local governing body — published governor minutes are the formal record, the Trust says, “but not applicable in this case”

A trust may lawfully delegate that decision to its chief executive. Nobody is disputing that. What it cannot do is leave behind no evidence that the decision was ever taken.

A decision with no record of being made is not governance. It is an assertion.

No audit trail — followed immediately by the audit trail

The Trust does not hold a standalone tracking log, policy control schedule, or audit trail document of the type requested.

The next paragraph:

25th July 25, new policy drafted including changes from KCSIE 2025. 07 August 25, CEO approval for circulation to all DSLs and Principals.

Two dated events, produced seconds after declaring there was no trail to produce.

That is the second time in four letters that something “not held” turned out to be held. Once is an oversight. Twice is how they answer questions.

Two letters, two different stories

Asked how staff escalate a child protection concern, the school pointed to its Child Protection and Safeguarding Policy as its own held document — the school’s answer, the school’s procedures.

Asked who approved that policy, the Trust explained it is a central document, signed off by one person, which the school’s own governors never considered.

So the school’s answer on how it protects children rests entirely on a document that no governor at that school has ever approved or scrutinised.

“The Trust will consider disclosure” is not an answer

If any relevant Board, committee, or approval minutes are held but are not already publicly available, the Trust will consider disclosure of the recorded information held.

A public body has twenty working days and two options: hand the information over, or refuse it and say which exemption applies and why.

“We will consider it” is neither. The request was left formally unanswered while appearing, to anyone skimming, to have been answered.

“Have inserted the link”

https://www.westernhouse.academy/attachments/download.asp?file=645&type=pdf
Have inserted the link

Somebody’s note to themselves, left inside a formal legal response about child protection governance, and sent to a parent.

It is a small thing and we nearly left it out. We have kept it because it says the same thing the rest of this page has been saying: nobody read it back before it went out.