FOI_25-184 Reports of bullying and harassment
Date of response: 21 July 2025
We have now considered your request of 21 June 2025 for the following information:
Please provide the following information
Individually for each of the academic years
2020-1
2021-2
2022-3
2023-4
2024-5
The number of cases of bullying and harassment reported to the UEA via the Report and Support system or via any other system.
Please provide the data for the whole university and separately for the Norwich Medical School.
Include
Who the reporting party (victim) was – numbers of students and numbers of staff
• The gender of the reporting party (victim)
• The ethnicity of the reporting party (victim)
• Who the reported party (perpetrator) was – numbers of students and numbers of staff
• The location
Our response:
Please see accompanying document, our ref: FOI_25-184 Appendix A.
Please note that the University’s Report and Support application is used and monitored by both our Student Services, and our Human Resource Services departments. Some reports of the same incident may have been reported within both departments, and we have not been able to deduplicate all reports/incidents. Please also note that there may be instances of the same incident being reported by numerous persons or involving more than one individual.
We are only able to provide figures on victim and perpetrator information where this data had been entered into the applications by the person reporting; not all information requested was recorded at the time the report was made, which accounts for some discrepancies with the figures not adding up to the total number of reports received.
On this occasion, it is not possible to provide all the requested information. The Act contains several exemptions that allow public authorities to withhold certain information from release. We have applied the following exemption to part of your request.
| Exemption | Reason |
|---|---|
| Section.12 (1) | Appropriate limit |
We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide all the requested information.
Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide some of the information relating to the location of incidents, the ethnicity of victims, or the identity or demographics of the reported party.
We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.
'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.
Information relating to the location of incidents, the ethnicity of victims or the identity or demographics of the reported party is held by three departments: Student and Academic Services, People and Culture department and the School of Medicine. There is no central record of where all this information is held; this data is held in three separate systems.
For the period outlined in your request we have identified 142 records which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual record manually.
We have calculated it would take approximately 10 minutes per records, or 23.6 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual record. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
Under section 16 of the Act, we have provided the data held which we have been able to extract within the time limit. Should you wish to refine your request to which we can more fully respond, we believe would be able to respond in full to the data relating to the School of Medicine only, within the time allowed.
Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.
We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.
We are sorry we cannot provide all the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.