The months following the introduction of the GDPR were a fascinating time in education - at least for the numerous data geeks around our office! There had been so much advice, guidance and speculation going on that it almost felt like a damp squib when the expected flood of subject access requests and ICO fines didn’t quite play out.
Almost a year on however, things are starting to move with the ICO publishing their first school audit reports, with more still on the way. Clearly, those schools and trusts that are struggling to get the data protection basics right are going to get a call from the ICO eventually, although it will almost certainly be advisory in the first instance.
With that in mind, we were very interested to learn more about the actual, perceived impact of the new legislation on schools and trusts, particularly in finding out more about how much work they put into getting prepared and what the outcomes of that work were.
To this end, we conducted a survey of school, academy and trust staff members to take the pulse of data protection and GDPR towards the end of 2018. The survey was opt-in, so to offer some encouragement we put a couple of randomly drawn prizes on the line for two lucky schools to win either a full GDPR audit or a GDPR Health Check with one of our trained data protection experts.
We very much appreciate everybody who took the time out to help us the survey, as it has helped us make some very interesting observations about the state of data protection across education in the UK.
So - a very special congratulations to Trinitas Academy Trust who have won a free GDPR audit, and to Chulmleigh Academy Trust who are the proud recipients of a free GDPR health check!
The full, final report from the survey is in the process of being put together and will be released very soon!
Find out more about GPDR audits >>
