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Board of Trustees and privacy

A scene of a school inspired lounge. Blue lockers line the left wall. There is a blue run and the chairs and sofas are all orange and blue.Board of Trustees and schools often deal with highly sensitive information about staff, students, and families, so it’s important to know what you can do to help safeguard people’s privacy.

Five steps to help boost privacy

  • Be aware so you can model the kind of leadership required to ensure privacy is treated as taonga
  • Make sure your staff are using school email addresses and not their own accounts
  • Implement two factor authentication
  • Ask “why am I collecting this?” Does your school really need to collect this piece of information about your students?
  • Make sure students are asked before they get photos taken and respect their right to say no

Five good questions to ask to help promote good privacy practices

  • Is the information of the children and young people under your care treated as precious?
  • Are your IT systems fit for purpose?
  • Does your privacy officer (and every school needs one) have adequate training?
  • Is there good understanding about breach management, in order to prevent privacy breaches?
  • Do you have document retention and destruction policies in place?

Adding new technology?

If you’re thinking about changing how you’re collecting personal information, or implementing new technology at school, or even adding new software, then we recommend you take a few simple steps to understand possible privacy risks.

Need some help?

Our free online toolkit Poupou Matatapu sets out our expectations about what good privacy practice looks like and then helps you work towards that.

Our Ask Us function has a database of answers to questions like, ‘can a school monitor a student’s Wi-Fi usage?’, ‘can a school put parent details in a school directory?’, and ‘can I post photos or videos of my students to Instagram?

There’s also privacy support and advice available from Ministry of Education to help you, including items in Education Gazette.

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