FOI_25-199 Communications to students during COVID 19 pandemic
Date of response: 30 July 2025
We have now considered your request of 01 July 2025 for the following information:
In respect of each of the academic years 2019–2020, 2020–2021, and 2021–2022, please provide copies of all announcements, communications, or correspondence sent to students (including undergraduate and postgraduate students, both home and international) which relate to:
a. changes to the delivery of teaching;
b. teaching moved online;
c. blended or hybrid learning arrangements;
d. cancelled or rescheduled lectures, seminars, or practicals;
e. any disruption to academic provision due to the Covid-19 pandemic; and
f. guidance or updates regarding return to campus, campus closures, or remote learning provisions.
This request includes, but is not limited to:
a. mass emails or newsletters to students;
b. updates posted on the University’s student portal or website;
c. departmental communications (where applicable);
d. internal policies, reports, or briefings concerning the University’s approach to
delivering teaching during this period; and
e. minutes or summaries of meetings where the delivery of teaching was discussed, to the extent that they relate to student-facing decisions.
Our response:
We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide 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 any of the information relating to all announcements, communications, correspondence sent to students which relate to changes to teaching delivery, teaching moved online, blended learning, cancelled or rescheduled lectures, seminars and practical’s, disruption to academic provision and guidance updates regarding returning to campus, campus closures or remote learning provisions for the requested period.
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 such communications or guidance as noted within your request, may be held within several University departments: the four University Faculties (Science, Medicine and Health, Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences), each school of study within those faculties, our Learning and Teaching Services, our Research and Innovation Division, our Post Graduate Research department and within our Administration, Recruitment and Marketing (Communications/COMMS) department.
Communications, including those regarding cancelled lectures or remote learning may be held by individual tutors, Heads of Schools, LTS, COMMS or by module organisers. There is no central record of where this information is held. The information may also be held by individual tutors, timetabling records and individual notes made on our learning platform Blackboard.
We are unable to ascertain an exact number of documents, teaching records, timetabling records or tutor records and documentation which may fall within scope of your request.
The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual tutor, timetable, LTS teaching record, communications such as emails sent during the requested period and Blackboard entries and notes made during the requested period.
Just taking departmental communications as an example, these messages and communications would have been via Head of School messages and include messages about the impact of individual courses which would have been via Blackboard announcements and from course directors as an example. It would take each of the 20 school of studies an estimated 2 hours, a total of 40 hours, to search their records which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we would be able to provide to you all central communications (COMMS) emails and updates for students relating to changes made and changes to teaching etc because of mitigations put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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 the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.