OVERVIEW
Schools hold an enormous amount of personal information. From the moment a child is registered, a school begins to collect, store and use data about pupils, their families and its own staff — names, addresses, dates of birth, attendance and behaviour records, assessment data, medical and dietary needs, special educational needs, safeguarding concerns, photographs, and much more. Almost everyone who works in a school handles this information every day, often without thinking of it as ‘data protection’ at all. Yet how that information is collected, kept, shared and disposed of is governed by law, and getting it wrong can cause real harm to children and families and serious consequences for the school.
You will learn about the school as a data controller, the legal framework (UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018), why children's data needs extra protection, the seven data protection principles, lawful bases for processing, the role of the Data Protection Officer, practical scenarios involving pupil and staff records, special category data and safeguarding records, photographs and consent, subject access requests, data sharing with other agencies, data breaches and reporting, and how to build a culture of data awareness across the school.
