Perhaps the title for this post attracted your attention and induced panic … or perhaps, probably like me, you have been bombarded with so many emails/spam/adverts that you have become inured to these messages and, with a momentarily and mildly irritated mental shrug of the shoulders, you press delete and into the trash it goes. Nevertheless, with the GDPR deadline round the corner you would probably be unusual if there wasn’t a tiny element of subliminal anxiety induced by these offers of advice, warnings, help and services that will solve all your data processing problems … for a price!
I would like to re-iterate again, we are no experts in the field and these are our own stumblings towards finding a solution to the GDPR challenges at our school, so I’m issuing another disclaimer here (please seek legal advice, etc) but nevertheless I don’t see any need for panic as we move towards the deadline even though I’m not sure we’ll have absolutely everything in place by the 25th. I say this as I was re-assured by a joint presentation from the ICO and DfE that I attended a recently. The first slide flashed up ‘GDPR WILL LEAD TO HUGE FINES’ which was then labelled by the ICO presenter and Senior Policy Officer, Victoria Cetinkaya, as ‘Fake News’. The general gist of what I took from what she said was that the most important thing was for schools to be addressing the legal changes, trying to work towards the new requirements and within the spirit of the law. The ICO will not be pro-actively hunting down schools to fine them and Victoria said the most likely worst case scenario would be if there was a complaint to them, from a parent for example, which they would then investigate and if there was a problem the ICO would make suggestions for changes in practice to the school.
It’s great that the DfE and ICO are working together on providing advice and guidance. There is now a plethora of GDPR toolkits out there, but nevertheless if you haven’t seen it, it is definitely worth a look. The advice given certainly now feels more relevant to the education sector – it’s just a shame it’s come along so late in the day (DfE published this on-line on 23rd April)! We have decided to mainly adapt their template documents as they seem the most straightforward for us to use. However, our schools come in many different shapes and sizes and it is clear to me that we are all likely to adopt slightly different practices that will meet the new requirements depending on various circumstances.
The link to the ICO education/GDPR site can be found here and click here for the the DfE GDPR toolkit.