Media release: Administrative access to documents held in public schools: How the Department of Education implemented our recommendations: Follow-up audit on Report No. 2 for 2021-22
The Queensland Information Commissioner’s report was tabled in Parliament today (29 April 2025), ‘Administrative access to documents held in public schools: How the Department of Education implemented our recommendations: Follow-up audit on Report No. 2 for 2021-22.’
The report presents the results of the follow-up audit about Department of Education’s (Department) progress in implementing the recommendations from the 2021-2022 audit about administrative access to documents held in schools.
The community, including school students, parents, teachers and staff, should be able to access government-held information quickly and easily as a matter of course, unless there is a good reason for government agencies to decline to provide access administratively.
Administrative access offers a way to access documents more easily than applying for information under the Right to Information Act 2009 or the Information Privacy Act 2009. A key benefit of these arrangements is that they give the community access to information faster and at a lower cost.
In 2021-22, we assessed how the Department of Education operated an administrative access arrangement for requesting documents held in schools. We tabled a Report in Parliament which made six recommendations on how the Department can improve its arrangements to administratively release information held by schools. The Department accepted all recommendations and agreed to implement them by May 2024.
In 2024-25, we commenced our follow-up audit to assess what progress the Department has made in implementing the six recommendations of our 2021-22 audit.
We found there is more work for the Department to do to implement all recommendations from our original audit. Three years after the last audit, the Department is still finalising its new administrative release procedure and guideline which directly impacts how schools go about making information available in a consistent and easy manner.
While the Department has made some progress in implementing the recommendations, its actions to date are insufficient to improve administrative access to documents held in schools.
Ms Kummrow, the Information Commissioner said, “A policy or procedure on administrative release provides the framework for and empowers school staff to quickly and consistently assess whether they can release information administratively”.
“We found that since our 2021-22 audit, the Department has drafted an administrative access procedure and guideline to assist staff and school communities to understand what information the Department and schools can make available and how to access it. However, the procedure and the guideline are not yet approved and available to school staff. The successful implementation of our remaining recommendations is contingent on this occurring,” said Ms Kummrow.
“Releasing information held in schools administratively, in particular when a student, parent or teacher requests their own personal information, supports the object of our right to information laws and Parliament’s intention that government-held information be released administratively as a matter of course with formal requests as a last resort” said Ms Kummrow.
Read the full report (PDF, 2175.22 KB)
Media contact: Steve Haigh
Phone: (07) 3234 7373
