How good are you at your job? Does your boss know? If your boss is the British public - in other words, if you're a public sector worker - do they know?

The transparency agenda of this government and its predecessor has recently opened up a lot more information about the details of public spending. Some of this has been about the salaries and expenses of identifiable individuals, with more promised for the future.

But to assess value for money, cost is only half the equation - the other half is achievement. Plenty of data about targets and indicators for public services has been issued over the past few years - but much less about specific staff. Freedom of information requests have only occasionally (such as for heart surgeons) produced records about the performance of individuals.

These thoughts occurred to me after I came across a project in the Los Angeles Times, which rated the success of 6,000 of the city's teachers by name. This was actually published last August, but I only became aware of it last month when it won the top award at the conference of the US National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.

The teachers' results were based on the "value-added" progress made by their pupils from year to year in standardised English and maths tests. The LA Times included a list of the 100 teachers who scored best according to this system, although it doesn't seem to have publicised the lowest performers in the same way.

Of course not all those covered by this analysis are happy, and this kind of methodology for measuring teacher effectiveness has been criticised by some.

Now other newspapers in different parts of the US have tried to get the same information. A judge in New York has ruled that the interests of parents and taxpayers should outweigh the privacy rights of public employees.

It's very unlikely that the same kind of data about the performance records of individual teachers would be released in the UK, even if the information existed in that form. As well as the privacy concerns, questions would be raised about how well one numerical measure could encapsulate an individual's achievements. But the LA Times didn't find it easy to obtain the material either.

When I told Jason Felch, one of the leading reporters on the story, that there would be enormous resistance to the publication of such data here, he replied:

"'Enormous resistance' is a fair description of what we faced".

Is that resistance justified?

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As the BBC has reported this morning, a Metropolitan Police senior officer preparing for the student protests against tuition fees last December had what he considered a "cunning plan".

Whether Baldrick would have done a better job than the Police then did of protecting the car carrying the heir to the throne and his wife is not known. But given what happened, it has proved to be a very unfortunate choice of comedic reference.

The cunning plan developed by the Police consisted of "flexibility", according to the internal briefing paper received by the BBC through a freedom of information request.

If you want to read the entire document, it's here [264KB PDF]. A small word of warning: you may feel disturbed if you have a sensitive disposition when it comes to spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and strange jargon (officers are warned to avoid negative photo opportunities such as drinking coffee while "embussed").

Our FOI application also obtained the Police tactical plan [664KB PDF] for the first student demonstration on 10 November, which resulted in extensive damage to the building housing the Conservative party headquarters.

This plan shows how the Police apparently failed to consider any possibility that the Tory offices could become a target for demonstrators, even though they knew the protest route would go past that building. The Police instead focused on protecting the Palace of Westminster and government buildings such as the Department for Education.

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The Department of Health has been forced to reveal today that it spent £239 million on swine flu vaccine.

 

This information has been made public as a result of a freedom of information request by the BBC and an appeal to the information commissioner.

The Department of Health refused to give the information to the BBC when my colleague Julia Ross asked for this data in February last year. The department rejected the FOI application on the grounds that it would breach commercial confidentiality.

We then appealed to the information commissioner, who ruled last month that the total sum paid on obtaining doses of swine flu vaccine should be disclosed.

The commissioner however ruled against the publication of a more detailed breakdown of this spending which we had also asked for.

The department has today complied with this decision and issued an overall figure. It has revealed that it had paid two drug companies £239 million for vaccine doses until the end of deliveries in April 2010. These supplies were for the anticipated swine flu pandemic which failed to materialise.

Most of the money was paid to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for its Pandemrix vaccine, and the remainder to Baxter Healthcare for Celvapan.

The department was left with many unused doses, although some have been used this flu season after stocks of the latest seasonal flu jab proved insufficient.

This case illustrates the limits of commercial confidentiality under FOI. It shows how claims sometimes made by public authorities about possible damage to commercial interests are not necessarily strong enough grounds for refusing freedom of information requests.

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