A government department has been heavily criticised by the Information Commissioner for its handling of a Freedom of Information request.

The Department of Education, Sport and Culture’s ’foremost consideration’ was how to withhold rather then disclose information either by applying exemptions, or calculating how long it would take to redact the documents, he concluded.

Information Commissioner Iain McDonald directed the DESC to release, within 30 days, the requested moderation reports for 10 of the island’s larger primary schools.

Copies of the reports were originally submitted in an FoI request on June 26 this year.

Responding to the Information Commissioner’s findings, school league tables campaigner David Watts, of Castletown, quoted Sir Walter Scott’s ’Oh! what a tangled web we weave; When first we practise to deceive!’.

Mr Watts said: ’This sums up perfectly the approach taken by the DESC.’

Moderation is an inspection process by which grades awarded to pupils in certain subjects are checked to ensure there is consistency against an island-wide standard set of assessment criteria.

The DESC twice refused to release the reports - rejecting the initial FoI request and then refusing to override this decision on internal review.

But now the Information Commissioner has upheld the complaint.

The DESC had cited a number of reasons for turning down his request.

Initially, these centred on the burden of redacting certain information together with the claim that ’disclosure would inhibit the free and frank advice and otherwise prejudice the effective conduct of public business’.

It explained this would ’inhibit’ the work of the department-appointed moderators in giving an objective judgement.

’Moving away from this moderation system would undermine the whole basis of the department’s approach to teacher-moderated assessment and thereby risk the improvement of standards across schools,’ it claimed.

The Commissioner noted the refusal notice was issued less than one hour after all the reports had been gathered.

Addressing the DESC’s stated ’burden’ of having to review, redact, extract or reformat information, he found this ’cannot be taken into account when considering whether an exemption applies or where the balance of public interest lies’.

And he said: ’It seems the public authority’s foremost consideration on receipt of the request was how the information could be withheld either by applying exemptions or redaction, including calculating the time it may take to redact the information in an attempt to evidence some form of burden.’

Mr McDonald added: ’Instead of gathering the information with a view to giving the information to the requester promptly, the public authority appears to have spent time and effort in considering redaction of information it had not gathered and without sight of the information, sought to apply an exemption to all the information.’

This is the second time the DESC has been directed to publish information after initially refusing to do so.

The first time resulted in key performance data for the island’s primary schools being put into the public domain for the first time.