 Thank you Rebecca. Hi everyone, and thank you for having me here today. I'm going to talk about a campaign that I co-founded which relied heavily on FY responses which we gained through the What Do They Know website, which is part of my society. So before I go into exactly how we used FY, I need to give a little bit of background to the campaign. First of all, I should let you know I'm speaking as a parent today who co-founded this campaign three years ago. a wneud i'r cwmpain i fynd ar ddiolch ymddangosu ffynol i Gwyrddol yn Sgolwedd i'r ddefnyddio'r llyth arall, a'r cwmpain i'r ddiddordeb i gyd ymddangosu rhaid i ddaid gysylltu ymddangosu a'r ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb i gyd i'r ddiddordeb i'r ddiddordeb i gyd— i ddiddordeb i gyd o'r ddiddordeb i gymryd, oherwydd, wedi bod yn 4,5 o 5,5. … and I've got along with some other parents who've managed to inform ourselves through the web internet that we actually had a legal right to defer our children, even if they were over 5 and a 1 2, as long as now they had not turned age six by the school's starting date. So very quickly this is the law in Scotland which has actually been enforced since 1980 in the highlighted section, explains that any child who's not five by the school's start date, which is inevitably in August, but very slightly bydd yw 32 o gydag cyfraith ar ysgrifennu'r Llyfrgell, rwy'n ddarparu hwn o'r gwell yn dweud, so dyna chi'n cael eu gael, rwy'n gyffredin, d Bismarff ydw i, y gychydig dda i'r berffratheth ie 15 o oes 2017. Yn yw yw 2022 yma, dyna yma yw'r ddweud yn cyffredin, ond mae'n haf rhoi hyn o'r ddweud, ond y ffordd yn y dda chi ar ddi ddibl oeddy, ond yw Llyfrgell yn ysgrifennu a'r ddechrau, rydyn ni fod mae'r gweithio os arall yn fefryd you have a legal right to defer and you will receive the all-prized nursery funding for a further year when mid August to December born cohort who are still four at the school start day didn't it wasn't very widely known of research survey we did nationally in 2018 which had nearly seven hundred parents in every single local authority area responding showed that only 16% of parents new that in August you could defer a child. So we started to get quite anxious about the fact that it was very difficult for us to find this information and then once we found it we realised that actually even though we have a legal right to defer our children who we think we don't want them to start schooling to their older that was a relief great but we don't have an automatic entitlement to continued nursery funding and for many families that is absolutely essential to enable them to both parents to work or to meet around family life and in Scotland you have a 99% uptake rate at the moment for age three to five year olds in nursery places so what inevitably this meant was that there was a discrepancy between the actual legal right to defer a child who hadn't turned five by the school start date and the entitlement to automatic continued nursery funding and really that was down to individual councils whether they would grant that or not. No parent has ever said to us yeah I don't mind if they grant it or not because obviously there's a lot of money involved in that and the expense to the parent another issue was that if the council refused it that they could they could oust your child from that council run nursery so that you would have to then move them to another nursery a private one all the unsettling of that for the child and the family and then the additional cost because private nursery was much more expensive than council nursery so there's a lot of issues here and so we established that there was these discrepancies from anecdotal evidence given by parents but then we really wanted to prove it and that's where FOI came in initially we sent FOIs to the 32 local authorities by private email and my goodness it was hard we are all lay people some people had processed FOIs through their work but suddenly in our free time when you've got young children and a job and everything else to juggle your 32 FOIs to process and process the jargon that came with them and then you know sort them all on your email inbox and you know just all the additional time requirements of that and then for me one thing that I hadn't expected but which became pretty scary actually I'm not a journalist I'm not trained in data processing and one of the things that I found very hard was knowing what I could share and what I couldn't share so for example and this was the the the tale of an email signature that I got from a local authority and the number one it says this is sent in confidence for the address you only it may contain legally privileged information and I'm sorry that word legally just sets off alarm bells for me jata protection GDPR I thought the freedom of information when it was free I thought the onus was on them to decide what to share and suddenly me is a private citizen with no training suddenly had to have this um uber sense of what I could share or not would I be liable if um I shared information that was sensitive or official some of these emails were labelled with those terms and it became this you know I was getting in this you know vortex of going around my head and analyzing it what could I do what could I not do and it actually you know if I hadn't found the what do they know website it would have been prohibitive to what we actually managed to achieve in the campaign in the end and you know actually getting that information out there so here's some of the information that we found sending through the what do they know website was brilliant because it took the pressure off any individuals to decide can I share this or not because everything's public everything's got a web link the the authorities that respond know that it's going into the public domain and therefore the onus is on them as it should be to be transparent to provide what they can provide or not so you can see here that we established across all the 32 local authority councils in Scotland the rate of approving these requests for funding over the last three years we've used a sort of traffic light system without the amber to identify different local authorities and their rates of approving these or not and you can see that there's discrepancies there while we've gone up from 13 councils approving all requests in 2018-19 to 19 now um you know if you live in one of those unfortunate authorities that doesn't you know have the the automatic funding policy then it's a very difficult time for you as a parent to decide whether to move your child nursery can you afford it but in good news um we got we lobbied using the information that we fit we established from the what do they know website or fois and we've successfully lobbied for the law to be changed so in Scotland from august 2023 any child taking up that 1980 43 year old right to defer their school start will automatically be guaranteed a further year of nursery funding by ticking a box and that is just such peace of mind for us as campaigners to know that other parents won't have to go through what many parents have suffered and experienced over the last few years and to have to potentially make a decision about their child's best interests and conflict with what they can afford thank you what do they know in my society three seconds to go thank you so much for taking that was a really that's a really lovely illustration of using foi to achieve a specific goal um and yeah again lovely to to know that there are there are great successes in the world