I'm wanting to change our Moodle to have it so any files uploaded by staff do not need to have the description as a required field. In other words they can upload files without a description attached to them.
Yes. If you look in the documentation at 5.2 Require activity description, it tells you how to change this - http://docs.moodle.org/en/File_resource_settings
Basically -it's in ettings > Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > File.
That's done the trick, thank you.