Date of response: 05 July 2024
We have now considered your request of 19 June 2024 for the following information:
Question 1… the number of Afghan students at your establishment each year over the past decade. Is there any chance you could kindly supply me with this information? Any support at all with this request would be most appreciated.
Our response:
| Academic Year |
Total number of Afghan students enrolled |
| 2014-15 |
<5 |
| 2015-16 |
<5 |
| 2016-17 |
<5 |
| 2017-18 |
<5 |
| 2018-19 |
<5 |
| 2019-20 |
<5 |
| 2020-21 |
7 |
| 2021-22 |
11 |
| 2022-23 |
21 |
| 2023-24 |
18 |
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 |
| s.40(2), Personal information |
Disclosure of some of the requested information would be contrary to the requirements of the UK General Data Protection Regulation |
We can confirm that the University does hold this data. However, due to the small numbers involved, we consider these details are exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act.
Due to the small numbers involved, it would be possible to identify a living individual(s) from this information and, therefore, we would consider it to be personal data. Disclosure of this personal data would contravene the first data protection principle of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that being Principle (a) – lawfulness, fairness, and transparency. We consider that disclosure would constitute unfair processing of the data as any individual would reasonably expect for their data to remain confidential and not released to the public. The University is only permitted to disclose personal data if to do so would be fair, lawful, and transparent. Therefore, the requirements of this exemption are met, and we are unable 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 1 and 4 in relation to the number of individuals with the value ‘<5’.