| SPOTLIGHT |
Warwickshire County Council has been granted an injunction restraining a man who runs websites dealing with the 11 Plus examination from breaching the confidentiality of papers.
Warwickshire sets papers provided by examiner CEM for its six grammar schools and uses the same papers for up to nine months for pupils who sit the test late, due for example to illness.
Schools must send to CEM completed papers and any unused ones and “entry into the public domain of some or all of the exam papers is regarded as a serious breach of security and CEM is obliged to provide an alternative exam”, HHJ Simon Baker noted.
He said Amit Matalia, who was originally subjected to an injunction in 2013, operated several websites that provide help to 11 Plus candidates, and had then sought to encourage children to recall all they could from the exams they had just taken and pass on this information via their parents.
The judge said Mr Matalia was “plainly a very intelligent and articulate man.
“However, he left me with the very firm impression that he is so committed to the cause of challenging the integrity of 11+ exams, at least those set by CEM and used in Warwickshire, that both his objectivity and his regard for the truth have been overborne.”
Giving judgment, HHJ Barker said: “Indirect collection or collation of recollections of exam content, by utilising parents as a medium to debrief children who have recently taken 11+ exams, falls squarely within the scope of threatened breach of confidence.”
Mr Matalia argued he did not intend to upload the information while any papers were current.
“This is nothing to the point because breach is not confined to publication, it extends in principle to any and all unauthorised use,” the judge said.
He added that “no reasonable person” could agree with Mr Matalia’s claim that he did not appreciate that it was a breach of confidence to solicit and collect or collate the information.
HHJ Barker added: “[Mr Matalia] cannot realistically have held the view that encouraging third parties to breach confidence was not itself a breach of confidence”, and that if he did not realise that the original injunction prohibited encouragement to breach confidentiality that could ”only have been because of wilful blindness to the constraints imposed upon him”.
He would impose a fresh injunction after hearing submissions on its terms.
Mark Smulian
