> Hi folks,
>
> A Friday conundrum. I'd be grateful for views, particularly if anyone has experienced similar circumstances.
>
> At the start of the academic year our quality office distributed questionnaires to incoming first years asking them what their personal goals were for their years at university (this was as part of our "Growing Lancaster Graduates" project on personal devlopment and progress files). One student stated on their form that their personal goal was to 'battle with and defeat their serious mental health problems'. They submitted the form with their name and signature. Our quality office mentioned this instance (no names, though) to our Student Support office, who wanted to contact the student to offer advice. The issues arising from this seem to be -
>
> (i) So far as I was concerned, the student had consentingly submitted data for the purposes of a particular survey only, so I was not prepared to allow Student Support to have their details or act on them.
>
> (ii) I did feel, however, that our quality office could at least write to the student to inform them of the services Student Support could offer. Now I know that the questionnaire wasn't intended for that purpose so this could be deemed to be "unfair processing", but I felt that the chances of the student in question feeling that this concept had been breached would be small.
>
> (iii) But, the Student Support office have pointed out that, in any case, Part 4 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 seems to place an obligation on public bodies to act in support of anyone who declares, in any 'official' way a disability - where support is not proferred, a public body may fall foul of the law in such cases. Hence, we appear to have a conflict between two bodies of legislation, particularly in regard of whether a release of information to Student Support as in (i) above is actually permissible.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Andrew Okey
> Lancaster University
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