News

📢📢 We're running some short webinars about the DfE Digital Standards.📢📢

📢 We would like to announce that Data Protection Education are sponsoring the data protection discussion forum with the Association of Network Managers in Education.

A high school in south London was closed for the first part of this term due to a ransomware attack.  Students were sent home advising parents that the school would be closed for three days while all staff devices were 'cleansed'.

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Another school has been hit by a cyber attack, this time in Canvey Island, Essex, who say the cyber attack happened during the summer holidays.

Schools are back in full swing, and so is our work at Data Protection Education! This week, we’ve been busy with data walks, on-site training, and booking meetings across various schools to ensure data protection standards are up to date and effective.

We've published a new e-learning module for 2024 data protection training.

Gone are the days when cyber security issues meant accidentally downloading a virus, it has grown to mean so much more, where data and identities are stolen, fraud is committed and businesses can be shut down from a cyber attack.  With that in mind we have created a cyber security best practice area to help guide and support your data protection compliance.

The data protection officer is mentioned many times in the DfE Digital Standards for Schools and Colleges as someone that should either be informed or consulted with.  As part of that consultation process, we would like to announce our new DfE Digital Standards for Schools and Colleges Tracker.

We are launching a new best practice area which has all the policies, documents and posters in one place.  You can find this page in our main best practice area:

We've put all the specific school and trust related data protection guides, documents and queries into one area to make it easier for you.

We recognised that a number of our customers needed a generic retention schedule to help get them started with their records management.

We've updated our 'Making the Rounds', data walk, to include some central processes that should be included in data protection and cyber security compliance:

An update this week from the ESFA has reported a change in requirements regarding IT security for colleges and special post-16 institutions (SPIs).

The ICO have issued a reprimand to a school that did not follow due diligence when introducing facial recognition technology (FRT).

The recent news has been full of the global IT outage that affected many systems over the weekend, including airlines and patient access.  Although the incident was not caused by a cyber attack, it is important to note that it was a cyber incident which affects everyone.

A cyber incident is an event with threatens the confidentiality, integrity or availability of information systems, networks or the information they contain.

Review our previous article: What's a Cyber

Plans for the new government to introduce legislation for cyber security, digital and data were outlined in the King's speech on 17 July 2024.

We've updated our end of term and end of year guidance, alongside advice for privacy considerations for special occasions (which also normally occur at the end of term).

As you all prepare to pack up for the Summer, we would like to remind you about the benefits of pre-holiday cyber hygiene.
Many of the cyber attacks that we see on schools happen on the first day of a long weekend or a holiday - that's because the threat actors know in some instances it might be a good while before anyone notices.  

Ageing and out of date technology is an every day challenge for most schools and small businesses, but is there a risk?

We are asked a lot about retention schedules and keeping file when a pupil moves onto another school.  
This short video explains the basics behind data retention and the implications of keeping data for longer than required.



  Knowledge Bank
We have a retention schedule on our Knowledge Bank portal where you can check the retention period for all types of files in  your organisation.

Visit our Records Management Best Pract