🚨 Data Protection Updates and Alerts – March ’23 🚨

Important Alerts and Urgent Updates

• The DfE has released a couple of updates to the process that allows you to share your daily school attendance data.
  • In February, they updated the list of data items in the ‘What data we need’ section, added information on school identifiable level data in the ‘How this data will be used’ section, and also updated the ‘data protection impact assessment (DPIA)’, ‘privacy notice’ and ‘data collection principles’ documents to reflect that this collection is now business as usual.
    Sections 2 (a), 3 and 6 in the DPIA have been updated.
    The data is being shared with schools, trusts and local authorities, with aggregated attendance statistics being published.
  • In March, they have added ‘date of birth’ to ‘We collect the following data items’.
    
    
• The DfE have also updated the guidance for meeting digital and technology standards in schools. They have added the following new sections to the guidance which should be circulated to the relevant individuals and/or teams in your organisation:
  • Filtering and monitoring standards for schools and colleges
  • Cloud solution standards for schools and colleges
  • Servers and storage standards for schools and colleges
    
    
• And, the DfE have also issued guidance on generative artificial intelligence in education. 
  The guidance makes it clear that the education sector must continue to protect its data, resources, staff and pupils, in particular:
  • Personal and sensitive data must be protected and therefore must not be entered into generative AI tools.
  • Education institutions should review and strengthen their cyber security, particularly as generative AI could increase the sophistication and credibility of attacks.
  • Education institutions must continue to protect their students from harmful content online, including that which might be produced by generative AI.