School Closures and Hub School Planning

In our last newsletter at the start of the month, we gave some information about contingency planning in the event that schools may have to close. Events have clearly escalated since then and as your school is likely to be empty for some time, or put to use in other ways, our advice today is:

1. Identify which pupils and staff will still be coming into school and ensure that you have planning in place for that (see below about Hub Planning).
2. Talk to staff about clearing down. Remove data from unsecure locations and classrooms, especially special category documents. Leave the buildings with a clear desk policy in place.
3. Check your ICT support has server maintenance in place, and can restart the server if it fails.
4. Look after your amazing people.

We have been doing some work with a couple of clusters trying to help continuity planning and risk identification. This is a start point for continuity planning and setting up hub schools. We will be progressing support and resources for this through the days ahead.

If this is useful in your areas, please let us know and we will continue to feed any planning, guidance and support resources through to you. If you know of others in your regions that would find this helpful, let us know and we will add to any circulation.

If you are further ahead than us, please feel free to share back… No point in everyone doing the same work from scratch!

While your school may be closed, we will continue to work for you.

• We will be working with you to play catch up on any compliance issues missed, as you have sought to deal with the current situation quickly.
• We will be writing new DPIAs for you, especially when required for any new processing you have rushed in. 
• We will still be offering guidance and support in the event of data breaches and Subject Access Requests.
• We are available and ready to meet with school contacts as soon as you are ready via our online meeting tool. 
• Our work will be continuing for you.

We will be monitoring the situation as it unfolds and will be ready to support in the event of further critical incidents that are likely to occur.

Further advice and guidance to help staying secure during the current situation:

Maintaining Security During the COVID-19 Health Crisis (Reform IT)

Cybercriminals Take Advantage of COVID-19 Outbreak with Phishing Emails (Reform IT)

Please contact us if you do have further questions at GDPR@schoolpro.uk.

We are happy to support any school as much as we can over and above any service level at the time within our capacity. Please ask…

Stay safe and healthy,

Ian, Rich and Ben

SchoolPro TLC Ltd (2020)
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