Education SAR Support

Within educational settings, it’s fair to say that most subject access requests are made by people who are not happy about something. It may be the family of a pupil that has been disciplined or excluded, parents who feel their child’s needs are not being met, or even a former staff member who wants to know what information is recorded about them. Regardless of their motivation, anyone that you hold information about has a legal right to a copy of that data. And the institution typically only has one calendar month to provide that information. Who should handle the request?

Your named data protection officer (DPO) is usually the first point of contact for data requests, but they aren’t necessarily the best-placed person to collate, redact and report data. In fact, they may not even be a full-time member of staff, or they may be responsible for multiple sites across a multi-academy trust. In these instances it may be that SARs are passed on to admin staff. Whilst your admin team may be the most familiar with the systems that you use to record information, they aren’t necessarily familiar with the various pieces of legislation that cover subject access requests. Add in holidays and other absences and fulfilling a subject access request can end up involving multiple members of staff to ensure your timely compliance. This is where Data Access Office’s education SAR support comes in.

Our fully-qualified data protection officers can respond to a data subject access request on your behalf. The process begins by examining the scope of a request to understand which specific data is relevant to it. In some cases, the one month deadline can be extended. In these instances, our DPOs will advise the requester of the revised timescale, ensuring full legal compliance. Once the necessary data has been identified, we can handle the collation and upload of information into our secure online portal. Your team may be involved to access the data. However, since our team are experts in understanding the scope of a request, the process is more streamlined and a lot quicker than gathering everything “just in case” and then not using it. Any redaction that is required to protect third parties is handled by our team, along with any ongoing correspondence. An audit trail is kept at every step of the process for your protection. Finally, the completed report can be delivered to your school or directly to the requester on your behalf.

With reduced budgets now a fact of life across education, the obvious question is: why should you be spending your limited budget with a third party? The reality is that the cost of using Data Access Office is often more cost-efficient than the lost workhours that trying to handle internally results in. Plus, since we can provide end-to-end management of requests, there is no disruption to other time-sensitive tasks that your team would have to be taken away from to manage the request internally.

To find out more about our education SAR support service, call us today on 0161 524 7310 or click here to get in touch.