What happens if a school loses all its MIS data?

[superfletch]

Just putting it out there....

 

A school we support nearly lost everything on their single server recently.

 

Backups weren't done for the last couple of years so there was nothing.

 

What happens if a school loses all its pupil data (lets throw finance data in too - just for fun)?

 

Legally,

Financially,

With the DfE,

etc

 

How much different is it between a small primary and a large secondary?

 

I'm guessing it must have happened somewhere already but google isn't coming up with anything.

 

Given that there really is no excuse for it these days, the penalties must be pretty big.

 

Any thoughts / experiences?

[FN-GM]

I saw a school who lost 6 months worth of data because they didn't back up. Nothing happened. I suspect its because of who the Network Manager partner was. That was years ago now.

 

I also saw a school lose 3 months of emails recently, again because no backups were taken. Again nothing happened!!!

Edited September 17, 2014 by FN-GM

[3s-gtech]

For us, if either MIS data or that many emails were lost, and I hadn't backed up, I'd probably be looking at a capability warning if not the sack. Rightly so tbh. In my role, the buck would stop with me - but that may not be the case in some schools (MIS backups could be managed by the LEA for example - ours and email backups were in years past).

[XiJ]

One of our schools recently moved from lea Internet to a 3rd party - including e-mail. The lea couldn't understand that we wanted ALL e-mail moving across. In the end we spent weeks of not months moving it manually from LEA exchange to office 365 just to get it done. I'm certain that they'd have just deleted it all if we hadn't yelled at them to wait.

[superfletch]

I guess I'm interested in what are the repercussions for losing the MIS data, for the school as a whole.

 

Specifically interested in the MIS data though. (ie - If a school lost SIMS and FMS and couldn't recover it).

[elsiegee40]

Were the school an academy, I suspect the EFA would intervene and for Independent Schools Companies House would get very upset at faikure to file accounts.

 

However, in practice I am pretty sure there are no formal threats over what would happen if you lost everything. Ofsted may well start querying the leadership and management for failure to secure pupil progress data. The Governing Body should be given a hard time too for failure to challenge risk.

 

The main thing though will be to get the school up and running as quickly as possible ... and probably find new leadership for the school. I think the risk is likely to be with only the samllest schools as bigger ones will have more servers and, inevitably, more IT tech time.

[CAM]

Primary? Not sure. Secondary at this time of year? Oh dear.

 

You would have no data for the census which often collects something the DfE picked out of a hat retrospectively over the previous school year. You would need to re-import Pupil Premium data (Adopted, FSM, etc). You'd need the old UPNs so Collect doesn't throw a fit when you upload. Sixth form schools would need to know what courses were being studied and when along with two years worth of Planned Hours. Which students switched, what attendance marks you had last term, exclusions data to report, dual registration students, students at risk of becoming persistent absentees, and so on.

 

Without historical data you wouldn't be able to return the census correctly and end up with lost funding for the school.

 

Oh and naturally, no record of staff who have been in from agencies having criminal checks or which students have which medical conditions and allergies would also cause the school to start failing other areas of an OFSTED inspection due to a lack of data.

Edited September 18, 2014 by CAM

[tmcd35]

Lost the entire MIS, as a secondary - It'd be carnage. Names, addresses, timetables, medical info, the list goes on. Thankfully I'm sure there are paper copies of the most important stuff in the vaults, and some information could be recaptured from the likes of the LEA, Key to Success, School to Schools, etc. It'd be a horrible but doable rebuild, even then there'd be major gaps in the data.

 

As @CAM said, the biggest impact will be in census returns which seriously effects funding. It'd be a frantic few weeks going to every third party imaginable to recapture as much of the data needed to get the census as accurate as possible.

 

Thankfully we're in a situation that if we lost absolutely everything then there are bigger things in this world to worry about than whether or not we can retrieve any data. Attendance, behaviour and progress tracking is now "in the cloud", everything is backed up termly and taken off-site 15 miles away, daily incremental backups are stored in a remote building onsite, the main storage array is designed to cope with multiple drive failure using a combination of RAID50 and hot spares. To take all of that out? At the very least they're rebuilding half of Norfolk!

[zag]

I guess I'm interested in what are the repercussions for losing the MIS data, for the school as a whole.

 

Specifically interested in the MIS data though. (ie - If a school lost SIMS and FMS and couldn't recover it).

 

I doubt anything serious for the school.

 

MIS data can be recreated. It really isnt a huge problem.

 

Would be a couple of days work to get the basics in place, tops. At the end of the day, as long as you have pupil records and can perform a census, that's all you really require.

 

Financial data on the other hand has implications, but even that I have seen companies recover from very quickly.

 

I think as network managers we worry about this kind of doomsday scenario but actually in real life things like this do happen (more regularly than you think) and organizations feel some pain, but its by no means terminal.

[Ephelyon]

Personally, I'm struggling to see how a school that lost all that data wouldn't have to just close (and then re-open as a very different entity next September obviously).

[creese]

The data belongs to the school. You can't be punished for losing what is yours.

 

Yes it will cause problems, some huge ones in many cases. OFSTED will not be impresses, but that's about as far as it can go.

[tmcd35]

Personally, I'm struggling to see how a school that lost all that data wouldn't have to just close (and then re-open as a very different entity next September obviously).

 

Why? Schools existed before computers. Your LEA could give you a list of who should be on roll, paper registers exist. That's half the battle there. Don't need computers to get kids in and sit them in front of a teacher. If lessons are timetabled then most staff would have paper copies, as would most students - so another bullet dodged there. A trawl of parents can recapture important medical, next of kin, contact, etc data.

 

The biggest problem will be the man hours the admin/it staff would need to take rebuilding the database once a new one is set up. Manual entry is slow. Even then there a few online sources to get some basic data going. CTF imports etc.

[zag]

One of our schools recently moved from lea Internet to a 3rd party - including e-mail. The lea couldn't understand that we wanted ALL e-mail moving across. In the end we spent weeks of not months moving it manually from LEA exchange to office 365 just to get it done. I'm certain that they'd have just deleted it all if we hadn't yelled at them to wait.

 

Couldn't you just have created PST files and copy the emails there with 1 click then reattach it to outlook later? I believe there are also automated tools as well.

 

We did this for all our teachers and admin staff and it took 3 days I think.

[Oaktech]

Disaster Recovery Plan.

 

Everyone should have one, it should work, the above situation should never happen...

[IrritableTech]

Nobody seems to have mentioned the Data Protection Act?

 

Principle 7 states: "Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data."

 

If you lost your MIS data - which is likely to be the most up-to-date therefore primary record of pupil and staff personal data (names, addresses, DOBs, medical info etc) you would be obliged to inform the Information Commissioners Office. What they would do depends on what other records you have and how accurate and up-to-date that info is, I'd guess.

[Ephelyon]

But schools are required to do quite a few things legally that involve data.

 

All schools are required to keep educational records for all pupils. All public organisations are also required to keep financial records for however many years it is now.

 

If a school does not comply with rather major areas of the law, it can be closed.

 

Besides, if you lose e.g. your progress tracking data, the education you can provide for existing cohorts will suffer significantly, to the extent that you probably couldn't "compete" as a school very well anyway, and the question of whether it's better to just "rip and replace" and start again with the school would arise.

 

Then there's attendance. All schools are required to take and store a register, containing at a minimum this, for this long, with these provisions to be observed where computers are involved. If you lose this, the school has fallen foul of the law. It's anyone's guess whether a prosecution (of the LEA, Governing Body, Head etc) would actually ensue, considering the focus should be on getting things back up and running as soon as possible for the sake of the kids, but there should be no doubt that it certainly could.

 

So in short I would say that none of the situations above should be considered in any way acceptable and their avoidance should be a top priority.

Edited September 18, 2014 by Ephelyon

[tmcd35]

Falling foul of the law is one thing, I'm sure the SLT, Governors and probably the poor Network Manager/IT guy would come under the firing line pretty quickly, but (using a mid-sized secondary as an example) if you close a school mid-November what do you do with 1000 kids till next September when (hopefully) the new school opens? Closing might not be a sensible option

[Ephelyon]

What tends to happen is they all get farmed off to other local schools in clumps, in the same way as if a school burns down. True, it's a right ballache, but at the end of the day it's happened before and it gets dealt with. I'd agree that closing the school probably wouldn't be the most sensible choice (unless the incompetence was just one more incident in a long line at the school), but if it's a case of saying could it, in theory, be enough to have the school closed and/or people prosecuted? Well yes, it could.

[matt40k]

I doubt anything serious for the school.

 

MIS data can be recreated. It really isnt a huge problem.

 

Would be a couple of days work to get the basics in place, tops. At the end of the day, as long as you have pupil records and can perform a census, that's all you really require.

 

ROFL!! I nearly fell off my chair when I read this.

[GrumbleDook]

There is a difference between 'lost' as in it has gone somewhere and you do not know and 'LOST!!!!' as is no longer available due to serious hardware failure, etc.

 

The former is a matter for the ICO.

 

The latter is a complete pain in the backside but not unrecoverable.

 

1 - If you are a state school someone else will have some of the data. In most cases (even with academies) the LA is the first point of call as data is shared with them on a regular basis, including admission data.

2 - Finance: this data can be rebuilt from hard copies ... it takes a long amount of time but that is why you see finance folk printing out reams of stuff and filing things away.

3 - Timetable: you can almost guarantee that your timetable has paper copies of things, or even a local export ...

4 - Emails: you are a bit stuck here. If they are gone, then they are gone. There may be local copies on machines and it is important you save them as quickly as you can, but a lost email is a lost email.

5 - Other Stuff: Marks, custom fields, analysis sheets, etc ... most folk do have local copies of stuff and it can be regenerated, but it is costly (in time and in additional staff to do it).

 

As part of an estimate on this in 2008 I spoke with a range of people about what the impact would be (after a nasty virus outbreak in a school that affected the MIS server) and a typical secondary school (1000 learners) would expect to take 3 months to complete rebuild everything *where information was still available in hard copy or alternate electronic forms*. It would take 25% of existing admin and support staff time, the goodwill of teachers to rein put some stuff, also require an additional 5 temps to do data input and 1 person full time to co-ordinate and manage. This was based on conversations with 8 schools and that was before MIS were being used for so much data analysis or being tied in with other products. Conservatively, for some schools I would double this now.

 

Different schools have different priorities of what they need to restore first, but it is generally as follows to allow a school to run.

1 - Contact details. Without these you cannot have children in school. If you have hard copy that you can rely on in the interim pass go and go to the next one.

2 - Timetable. You have to know which children are where and when. Again, if hard copy is available then pass go.

3 - Finance. Salaries have to be paid. Work with the LA / EFA / Bank to get this sorted asap.

4 - Assessment / attainment. This will vary depending on time of year ... but exam season and results season can make thing critical. Speak to your exam boards for support.

 

The rest tends to be as it comes and based on decisions from SLT.

[Ephelyon]

So where do you draw a line that says "we're this far through the year now, it's not worth continuing for this academic year at least"? We'll do the restorative work, but alternative arrangements will need to be made for the pupils in the meantime.

[tmcd35]

So where do you draw a line that says "we're this far through the year now, it's not worth continuing for this academic year at least"? We'll do the restorative work, but alternative arrangements will need to be made for the pupils in the meantime.

 

Unless OFSTED are already jumping over the SLT/Governing body looking for a reason to close, I'm not sure you do. I reckon in most instances the core data needed to function and teach could be pulled together inside a week. The rest as @GrumbleDook says is many hours of admin time manually re-entering everything. The school should be able to function around the data re-entry.

[localzuk]

My thoughts on this would be:

 

1. Ofsted/DfE - the school could end up in special measures if child protection data etc wasn't available.

2. DfE - the school could end up being given a kicking if they lost all their accounts data

3. ICO - the school could be fined/prosecuted for breaching the Data Protection Act.

4. Exams - could cause chaos with entries into exams courses etc...

5. Staff - things like salary data (if you're an academy) would be lost, and therefore staff might not get paid!

6. Parents - they would probably get upset and call for various people to be sacked

[GrumbleDook]

I should be clear when I state 'timetable' ... this includes attendance which is statutory to record and report on. Manual recording can last so long but eventually you need this to be done electronically to allow you to share it with those who have to have it.

 

As part of Business Continuity (which all schools have a plan for) the school will stay open. Unless it is a serious environmental failure (flooding, snow, asbestos, fire) the school stays open or makes alternative arrangements ... if there are 3 days left until the end of term, then yes ... the SLT may make a decision to close early for the summer ... but we are really talking about a few days, even if the school is only open for a handful of years (years 12, 10 and 9 are usual choices due to curriculum pressures).

 

For most circumstances that I think the OP was coming from, we are talking hardware / software failure ... If data that is submitted / provided to the school is lost, as in no longer accessible from the hardware / software still in your possession, then we are talking about data being wiped, not lost and available for others to pick up. The ICO (from asking this question in 2011) is interested in breaches of data where it has a direct impact on the person. If this is where a child is not taught correctly due to medical information not being available then there is an impact. If that data is kept in another format and is still available then it has not had an impact, and so it would be hard to show any issue.

 

The ICO would have serious concerns that the data was wiped and would take time to recover / replace (but it would be recoverable) but in the same way that a fire can destroy paper records, the ICO would not look at that as a breach. The fact that half-burned records are strewn across a car park afterwards would be something they look at.

 

If in doubt, call the ICO hotline with the following scenario:

 

A school has a lightning strike and, due to unforeseeable hardware failure on the UPS, the MIS server hosting all electronic data on staff, students, finances, etc is toast. The local backups are not available due to unforeseen hardware failure. Planned verification tests were due but had not been completed for that year meaning that the backups presently hold no meaningful data that can be restored. In this scenario what issues do ICO foresee?

The school has access to significant portions of data in other formats or in other locations (hard copy, data held centrally by LA or central government, local electronic copies) and can gather these together to regenerate majority of the data.

 

If someone would like to volunteer to do this and report back it would be helpful to this thread.

[Ephelyon]

It's the fines that are a good point there too. The school may not be able to afford them and have to suspend operations for that reason, though of course in practice it's far more likely that the LEA would have to pay them on its behalf (though what happens with academies there, I've no idea). Then again, if the LEA as the ultimate employer decides that various staff have caused it to have to spend silly amounts of money, it may simply fire them... so it's potentially game over for key staff (and possibly the NM too) either way.