Correspondence referring to Confucius Institutes funding: FOI release

Information requested

You asked for information about funding to Confucius Institutes from the Scottish Government and emails between the Scottish Government referring to Confucius Institutes or with a Confucius Institute.

Response

In the first part of your request you asked:

•  If the Scottish Government has supplied any funding to Confucius Institutes from the 2005/06 financial year to the 2022/23 financial year
•  If so, how much funding (£) the Scottish Government has given to Confucius Institutes from the 2005/06 financial year to the 2022/23 financial year

The Scottish Government has presented funding to separate Confucius Institutes within the financial years requested “2005/06 financial year to the 2022/23 financial year”. The Confucius Institute at Edinburgh University received funding of £300,000 in the financial year 2005/6. Confucius Institute for Scotland schools (CISS) which is hosted by the University of Strathclyde received a total of £6,667,388 over 10 financial years as broken down in the below table:

Year	CISS
2013-14	£580,000
2014-15	£754,000
2015-16	£754,000
2016-17	£754,000
2017-18	£754,000
2018-19	£754,000
2019-20	£678,600
2020-21	£568,269
2021-22	£550,519
2022-23	£520,000
Total	£6,667,388

• You also asked for A copy of the emails - including the full email chain - sent or received by the Scottish Government referring to Confucius Institutes for April 2022 and September 2022
•  A copy of the emails - including the full email chain - received by the Scottish Government from any Confucius Institutes or the Chinese education ministry for April 2022 and September 2022

I enclose a copy of emails identified which met this criteria, including relevant attachments.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some that information. This exemption applies because it is personal data of a third party, i.e. names/contact details of individuals, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018.

This exemption is not subject to the ‘public interest test’, so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption.

 As such redactions are applied in the attached document.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202300380340 - Information Released - Annex

File type

44 page PDF

File size

919.1 kB