Committees

Papers: Guidelines for authors

This section focuses on aspects of which anyone writing a committee paper needs to be aware.

The sections on formal dimension of committee papers, and on records on the Committee Servicing website are mainly relevant to Committee Secretaries, but may provide a useful background to all authors on the reasons for some of the detailed guidance below.

For Discussion, for Formal Decision, or for Report?
Open, Confidential, or Reserved Business?
Layout of the paper
Ordinances and regulations
Organisational matters
Practical tips
Example and Template

As soon as possible in your preparation of the paper (or before you start if you can), please tell the Committee Secretary whether you expect the paper to be For Discussion, for Formal Decision, or for Report.

Should the paper be Open, Confidential or Reserved business? Most papers are Open business, which means that in principle the College has to make them available to anyone in the world on request, within 20 days of agenda circulation. If you think your paper should not be considered as Open Business, let the Committee Secretary know this as soon as possible.

If your paper is about the personal affairs of individuals, it is straightforward that it should be designated Reserved (if it is about current staff or students) or Confidential (if it is about someone else). However, if you would like it to be Confidential for another reason, this is only possible if it meets specific criteria related to the Freedom of Information Act (2000). You need to consider:

• which particular Section in the Freedom of Information Act exempts the from general disclosure;
• whether you are confident that the Exemption your propose satisfies the Public Interest Test (if it applies to that Exemption);
• for how many years after the meeting the paper must remain Confidential.

Formally speaking the Committee Secretary, in consultation with the Chair, is responsible for assigning business to the correct categories, but he or she will be heavily reliant on evidence from you to support any case for Confidentiality.

For further guidance consult the College's Information Law web pages, and in particular:

• the section containing the College Policy on Reserved and Confidential Business (which has a subsection for authors of Committee papers)
• the Exemptions section of the Freedom of Information Policy, which ranks and annotates all the Exemptions according to their likely applicability to the College's business, provides hyperlinks to official guidance on each one, and tells you whether each is subject to the Public Interest Test.

If only part of your material needs to be designated as Confidential, you could either write it up as two separate papers, or put all the Confidential material in an appendix which the Committee Secretary can circulate in the Confidential section of the agenda papers.

Layout of the paper 

This is addressed in a more detailed version in the section on the formal dimension of committee papers provided to Committee Secretaries.

Coversheets:  Contain background to the writing of the paper (where not obvious), specific dates of any other committees which have considered it, and what you now want this committee to do with it. Concludes with any Resolution which you want the Committee to make, or a Recommendation to their parent body (you may find it helpful to consult the Committee Secretary on the detailed wording as there are formal rules for this).

Papers: Contain substantive information and policy intentions (or may actually be the proposed text of a draft policy, depending on the type of paper). They do not contain any reference to the particular committee that is now receiving it, or any draft resolution (decision): these elements should be in the coversheet.

However, a coversheet is not needed unless there is substantive information to convey:

-  Avoid creating a coversheet containing a single sentence asking the Committee to note the paper: this is automatically carried on the agenda sheet prepared by the Committee Secretary.

- For very minor proposals, such as proposals for a small, straightforward change to the composition of a committee or the text of a regulation, there is no need for a separate coversheet either. In these cases, the draft decision can simply be included on the agenda sheet: you will need to liaise with the Committee Secretary on the wording of this.

Organisational matters

The Committee Secretary will normally let you know the standard deadline he or she has set for papers for the relevant meeting. If you cannot meet this deadline, tell her or him as long in advance as possible (and certainly before the deadline has been missed). If your paper is only a little late, it may still be able to go with the main circulation without any overall delay if the Committee Secretary can plan the logistics in advance.

If you are asking other members of staff to contribute material for your paper, ask them to provide it sufficiently in advance of the Committee's deadline for you to incorporate it in time (checking that you will be available at the right time to do this). If you cannot be available to finalise a committee paper at the due time, warn the Committee Secretary either that there will be a delay, or that you have delegated finalising the paper to someone else.

If possible, agree with the Committee Secretary provisionally in advance of the meeting whether he or she should take care of forwarding the business to any further committee, or whether you are to be involved again (eg in revising or composing a coversheet: see above). If you do need to stay closely involved yourself, clarify with the Committee Secretary how much time you will have to do any revisions. If timing is tight you will need to block time in your diary during the relevant "window".

Ordinances and Regulations

Please consider whether the adoption of any proposals you are making will have implications for Ordinances or Regulations. It is not necessarily your responsibility to draft the appropriate amendments. However, you need to allow time for this to be done, and to be aware of the fact that if your proposal is considered within the committee system before the amendments have been drafted, any approvals will be conditional upon the approval of those amendments. It is advisable to discuss with the Secretary of the relevant Committee at the earliest opportunity what is the most straightforward approach in the particular circumstances.

Practical tips

Adherence to the following basic points will increase the efficiency of the system overall without any significant input of time by authors:

• Write your paper into the committee paper template from the start: essential behind-the-scenes formatting elements will be lost if you merely print it off and try to copy it into another file
• Design your paper in black font for copying onto ordinary A4 paper unless another, more costly, approach is essential. (Hatching/patterns in bar and pie charts can for example obviate the need for colours.)
• Use the font indicated in the current committee paper template. (This will be a sans-serif font, and the size is also specified in the template.)
• Don't use underlining (eg in headings), except to indicate the presence of a hyperlink in the online version of the document.
• Send the paper to the Committee Secretary in one electronic file as far as possible (even if it consists of a mixture of portrait and landscape sections), pasting spreadsheets into the main Word document if they are simple and small. But if your paper is Open Business with a Confidential appendix, put the Confidential appendix in a separate file.
• Don't use automatic numbering, as the numbers need to remain stable when parts of your paper are cut and pasted. (Microsoft Word has automatic numbering as a default setting: you need to suppress this by selecting (in successive menus) "Tools - - Autocorrect Options - - Autoformat as you type, and then unticking "Automatic Numbered lists".)
• Don't number the pages of your document (and in particular avoid referring to sections of your paper by page number): the pagination may be different on the Committee Secretary's printer, or alter when any reference numbers and coversheets are added.
• Don't use any logos: the standard Goldsmiths logo is right-centred, so has to be omitted from committee papers, where the right-hand corner should be occupied by the meeting code and paper number. The logo also takes up unnecessary server space in the committee archive (which would have impact over a number of years of committee papers. (A logo, where preferred, should be added after final approval of the substantive text within the committee system, and before publication.)  
• Don't use tracked changes to indicate such matters as proposed revisions to regulations, as this is lost in some of the standard processing operations (such as saving under the filename assigned in the Committee's records). Instead, format the fonts using bold, strikethrough and so on to produce the same visual effect in a less transient form.
• If you have to send a complex Excel file to a Committee which cannot be merged into the main Word document, check that it contains only the worksheets which you want the Committee to receive. (If it is essential to include other worksheets to make formulae function properly, please ensure that the Committee Secretary knows which should actually be printed for circulation. You should also inform the Committee Secretary if the worksheets behind a committee paper have a higher confidentiality level than the committee paper itself: if you do not do so they may be inappropriately disclosed in the event of a Freedom of Information request, as it is standard practice to make FOI disclosures in electronic form.)

Example and Template

Example of a paper [pdf]

Template for a paper [Word Document]