FOI_26-151 SCI Faculty Academic Professorship promotions

Date of response: 07 August 2026

We have now considered your request of 08 July 2026 for the following information:

Question 1: I would like to make a FOI request for the number of ATR faculty members within the Faculty of Science who were promoted to associate professorship between summer 2020 and summer 2026 promotion rounds (inclusive of summer 2026) without fulfilling the following desirable criteria from the Academic Progressions Handbook: -R23. Supervise successful completion of PhD students

My request only asks for the total number and does not need any other data.

Our response:

<5.

Question 2: I would like to make a FOI request for the number of ATR faculty members within the Faculty of Science who were promoted to associate professorship between summer 2020 and summer 2026 promotion rounds (inclusive of summer 2026) without fulfilling the following expected criteria from the Academic Progressions Handbook: - E10. Advance HE accreditation at the level of Fellow or higher.

My request only asks for the total number and does not need any other data.

Our response:

<5.

For data we hold re supported applications for promotion to Associate Professor in the Faculty of Science, fewer than five staff had not attained Fellowship at the time of submitting their applications for promotion. However, implementation of their promotion was made conditional upon submitting their application Fellowship.

In a small minority of cases, the Promotions Committees may decide to support a promotion subject to the individual submitting an application for Advance HE Fellowship, where all other required promotion criteria have been met and good progress has been made with the Advance HE application to date. However, the promotion will not come into effect until this condition has been satisfied.

<5 Exemption explanation:

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.

We can confirm that the University does hold this data and we believe that the requested information, constitutes the personal data of individuals, as defined by Article 4(1) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, due to the small numbers involved, we consider these details are exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act.

We believe that disclosure this data would be contrary to the requirements of Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR; namely that information must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner. These individuals would have no expectation that this information would be made publicly available, and we have not identified a lawful basis that would allow or require us to disclose this information. To ensure that we do not inadvertently release personal data in this response or in combination with other publicly available data, we have replaced all values between 0 and 4 in relation to the number of individuals with the value ‘<5’.