📨 Updated Subject Access Request Guidance for MATs & Schools
December 11, 2024
We hope that you have had a restful and enjoyable summer break! No doubt you and your staff are now geared up and well-prepared for the year ahead and with that in mind, we would like to welcome you to the first, bumper issue of our new monthly newsletter!
Each month we will be keeping you up to date with the latest news regarding data protection, covering a relevant current GDPR topic, and providing any other important updates needed for you and your school.
We always welcome feedback and if you have any suggestions on what you would like us to feature in future issues, please get in touch. Similarly, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like to book in a visit from us either for an audit or training. We look forward to seeing you during the year!
As we start the new year, you should be going through a number of processes with regards to your data:
If you are unsure about any of these tasks, please contact us to provide clarity.
Over the summer, our development team at System 15 has given our online portal a tune up, completed a couple of updates and added some new functionality. The key changes are as follows:
Data Decisions
The biggest change is the addition of a new tool to the portal: Data Decisions.
This tool allows you to record any data decisions that you make as a school, whose data this affects, why you have made the decision, how you will protect the data, and what the overall risk is to the individuals involved.
This is vital to provide justification and clarification around the processing of data when the decision means that data is processed in a way that could create a risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals, or involves special categories of data. It can also be used to detail incidences of one-off data sharing. It therefore demonstrates that you have considered the implications of your decision and have ensured that any risks have been mitigated as much as possible.
School Documents
Up until now, documents could only be uploaded into your School Documents by us. The portal now allows you to upload to your own School Documents. This is a feature that has been much requested so we hope that you find it useful and time-saving!
Global Documents
Documents in the Global Documents section of the portal will now be displayed in alphabetical order rather than in the order that they were uploaded. This should make it quicker and easier to locate the documents that you are looking for.
Please feel free to explore these updates further. If you have any questions about them, please contact us. We can also run through them in more detail with you at our next visit. If you have any suggestions regarding the portal, please let us know and we will pass them on to the development team.
Over the summer, the ICO provided an update on the timescales for Subject Access Requests after a Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling.
Previously, the guidance stated that the timescale of one calendar month for response started from the day after the date of receipt. This has now changed so that the calendar month now starts on the date of receipt itself. So, if a SAR is received on the 4th September, it must be responded to by the 4th October.
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If you haven’t already, click on the image to download the poster which you can print and display in school for your staff.
Please contact us if you do have further questions at GDPR@schoolpro.uk.
We hope that you enjoyed the first newsletter and found it useful. Have a fantastic start to the academic year!
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