What happens if a school loses all its MIS data?

[GrumbleDook]

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

 

Ah ... the hidden art of management ... blame management ;-)

[localzuk]

Ah ... the hidden art of management ... blame management ;-)

 

Of course. In the end it is their fault. Sure, the axe will fall on those below but ultimate responsibility is at the top.

[GrumbleDook]

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.

 

Have a look at the scenario ... it is a good and real world one, where an NM might have a BC/DR plan in place, perform annual checks to make sure the data can be restored, etc but still be in a position where there is a failure that could not be foreseen.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Of course. In the end it is their fault. Sure, the axe will fall on those below but ultimate responsibility is at the top.

 

Sack the person who is ultimately at the top?

 

Depending on your theological position does that mean we sack God? Dickie D will be happy ;-)

[Banjo]

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.

 

Not all academies share. We have one academy who we wouldn't be able to supply data to in a CTF format. We could send them their latest census file, but that won't go into Sims or any MIS I know of without a lot of tweaking to the xml structure.

 

This has happened in our LA, and the secondary academy in question had to speak to the DfE about getting an extension to their Jan census as they recreated their DB. We also have primary schools who buy 3rd party internet/backup and we know aren't being backed up, but they are being told by their suppliers that the backups are being taken care of and are in 'the cloud'.

[localzuk]

Sack the person who is ultimately at the top?

 

Depending on your theological position does that mean we sack God? Dickie D will be happy ;-)

 

Sounds good to me!

[edutech4schools]

Our LA backs up the primary school servers to their site but we have no way of doing a disaster test apart from getting them to restore the odd file as we have no management software this end. I have started running my own onsite backups using windows backup which backs up to a USB drive, but this is always attached to the server so would be of no use if the server area burnt down.

 

I know that most other primary schools in my area do not even do an onsite backup and simply rely on the LA.

[matt40k]

had to speak to the DfE about getting an extension to their Jan census as they recreated their DB.

 

You'll be suprised how little data the DfE actually wants when push comes to shove. Still might affect your funding if you leave too many columns null

[zag]

Quote Originally Posted by zag View Post

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.

 

Why fall off a chair?

 

You think it would take longer? what part? I've seen our registrar lady import new student details in a few minutes.

 

I really don't see the huge "end of days" scenario here, an MIS is simply a database of student records in its basic form. I'm guessing most schools could easily build that back up from paper records.

 

Maybe I'm just old and remember how Sims used to be in the old days without all the bloat

 

If your talking about timetables, assessment data, reports ect then of course it takes much longer but are those _REALLY_ needed immediately in the scenario posted by the OP?

[matt40k]

I'm laughing cause your idea of how low impact losing your MIS system is. Speaking from experience - yes, the school can stay open - data collection sheets are almost always paper based, so that's student details, contact info and basic medical info covered. If your LA school, you'll be able to get a CTF from them, if they do your payroll, you could be fine - least you won't have all the staff after blood cause they haven't been paid. Finance records are indeed going to replicated, at least on paper. But these needs to re-keyed into the system - in the right order, correctly - else your going to get problems, ie restore from back and re-enter cause it doesn't match the central system. You've also just guaranteed yourself a visit from the external auditors every year for the next 6 years - and they will be grilling you for at least 3 years on backups and disaster recovery, add the census queries if you're pupil\staff data has magically changed from last years. Not sure about you, but I'm not sure I'd be happy if I worked in the office\finance and got told, oh bad news, we've lost our MIS system, but don't worry, we have enough info to stay open, you just need to re-enter a few fields - right so on top of the million and one things you normally do, you need to work with one arm behind your back - ie you have to hunt for every bit of info rather then it just being on the screen in front of you - but you have to fill in those "few" missing fields, those fields that turn a CTF from MBs into a GBs SQL database!!

 

So yes, I find your relax idea of how "easy" it is to recover from funny.

[zag]

Well I was kind of responding to the people who said the school would have to shut, loose funding or that Ofsted would somehow be involved. Just seemed a bit extreme to me.

 

I'm certainly not relaxed about it, just pointing out it wouldn't be the end of civilization itself

[localzuk]

Well I was kind of responding to the people who said the school would have to shut, loose funding or that Ofsted would somehow be involved. Just seemed a bit extreme to me.

 

I'm certainly not relaxed about it, just pointing out it wouldn't be the end of civilization itself

 

Not having certain data available is enough to put a school in special measures. Losing such data is enough for Ofsted to get involved and do an emergency inspection. So it isn't really extreme at all.

[matt40k]

You might lose funding, might gain funding!! - depends on SLT - more doors open up in a disaster, depends how they deal with it. In terms of hardware failure and no backups, I would argue however if they couldn't get good backup in the first place, they might not be the right people to get you extra funds, it's not difficult to put together a good business case for a solid offsite backup solution!

 

OfSted might ask the question a few more questions about your disaster recovery plans, really depends how well you deal with it - if you had to close for days, I would expect parents to complain and they'll bump the school up the list of schools to be inspected. Can't image they'd like the idea of being pulled anyway to go investigate at the last moment, so they'd be a bit more indepth.

 

In terms of failings - ie the technician didn't replace the hard drive when it was erroring and having a valid backup - I'd expect the governers\slt\la to ask for a investigation to find out was it their fault or was they're hands tied - ie no budget.

 

But yer, civilization as we know it won't end - just be a really hard few years.

[Banjo]

It takes us a week to convert a primary school to SIMS from another supplier using CTF's. Staff records have to be entered manually as they cannot be imported. CTF's can be read in, but if your an academy without the LA support then you have the job of typing in 1000+ student records, with the hassle of start dates/end dates for post 16 students. Depending on when it happened you would have to go and put in attendance for last year for the census. If your school was prosecuting a parent for their child's non attendance, then that case would collapse and you would be wide open to appeal on any successful prosecutions. Exams would be fun with UCI and candidate numbers, and you would have to cross your fingers that Nova was on a standalone laptop and the TT wasn't created on a shared drive on the MIS server.

 

Lot's of schools do backup's but how many actually test them on a regular basis in a test environment. I remember one secondary school had a 'meltdown' of their MIS server and tried to restore the SQL database from backup to discover that the plugin was not configured correctly and they had nothing. Luckily the DM had taken a backup (Facility) on her local machine a couple of weeks earlier that saved the day and probably a couple of people's jobs.

[zag]

There's no excuse for loosing a complete server or database these days with virtualization and 1 click backups.

[GREED]

My oh my oh my... how has it taken me so long to discover this post.

 

Of course, this also covers when a cloud product provider also goes pop or into administration, a topic I'm weighing in on heavily right now, and so the same procedures to tackle such an event, or prevent one, are nearly the same...

 

So some amusing soundbites so far:

 

MIS is equivalent to email if you lose it - REALLY??? The permenant loss of all other servers in the server room would not amount to the loss of this (bar maybe the document servers).

 

We can just 'recreate' the data - woah! I'm hoping we mean rediscover data as in collect again, not just create it!

 

Above all, I'm shocked at the complete lack of importance MIS data is shown in some posts here. It has become the single source of truth and point of reference in nearly every school and an intricate part of daily life, from taking registers (ergo ensuring you are aware where kids are, ergo you know if you need to alert authorities to a dangerous situation), to having emergency contact details, to having the history of a child's attainment so you know how to plot and program their next phase of education... need I continue? And then there is funding. Ever 6 which takes into account FSM history and other factors. Exams enrolments. OK you MIGHT be able to garner some of this from the LA (Academies?) or the exams boards, but at the wrong time of year (Autumn Census) you are in a whole pile of doo doo.

 

I'm not sure most secondary schools would be able to remain open for very long anyway without access to key information, even before ofsted get involved.

 

I recommend and have implemented complex DR procedures in schools to ensure that such an event can (nearly) never happen, even if you have to have a backup on a single laptop.

 

Sorry, once again, how is the loss of historical assessment information for example, not catastrophic for an individual child let alone the entire school?

 

Having to stop now as I will actually rant until the character limit...

 

/RANT

[GREED]

But yer, civilization as we know it won't end - just be a really hard few years.

 

The medium and long term impact on individual students might be a lot harder, if a school is using their MIS to guide learning and inform on things like SEN provision, behavioural records assessment trends...

 

Which will ultimately impact on school performance and then school reputation, an Academies could find that harder to recover quickly from.

 

I'm not saying that in an instant kids futures are all over, lets not be silly, but I don't think it wise to underestimate the impact on the kids and the school.

[Ephelyon]

That's exactly it. It's the impact on kids of things like attendance data for court cases missing, Ever 6 information unavailable, assessing progress against targets (which don't exist anywhere else), behaviour patterns... the loss of that has an impact, and that impact to me falls squarely within the category of "absolutely unacceptable scenarios".

 

I'm then extrapolating that such an impact could quite easily be enough to cause the school, over whatever length of time, not to be able to compete locally to the extent that it either ends up in special measures, has its leadership replaced, is force-converted to Academy status against its will etc... is it really just me who calls that an "automatic game-over" in terms of bare-minimum standards we should expect to avoid at all costs?

Edited September 18, 2014 by Ephelyon

[GREED]

Let's ask parents... would they find it acceptable for a school to have no idea of a child's ability or past?

[superfletch]

Thanks all so much for your views and replies on this. I'm totally with @GREED on the pupil history thing which for me, is why you can't just "re-enter" this kind of data easily. If the MIS is being used well in school, it is so much more than a few contact details. When you get into finance, salaries and different issues for academies the water just seems to get even deeper, hotter and more shark infested!

 

I was shocked when the techie in the school concerned with this "nearly incident" recently didn't seem too worried about the whole situation.

 

@PhilNeal - Penny for your thoughts on the subject?

 

Thanks again everyone.

Edited September 18, 2014 by superfletch

[GrumbleDook]

Let's ask parents... would they find it acceptable for a school to have no idea of a child's ability or past?

 

Just because the MIS goes pear-shaped it does not mean all data and information on learners is lost and that a magic cloud descends on the school which means staff suddenly forget that they have the same information in other places and that they can't even remember what the children look like!

 

To make an assessment about the amount of time, effort and resources that are needed to make sure that the MIS is instantly replaced a school needs to way up the likelihood and the impact. If the impact is mitigated by using data and informations in forms *other* than the MIS, then this is a reasonable approach to give enough time to get the MIS up again.

 

I have seen this range from 2 days (in a fully virtualised service with cloud-based snapshots of the VMs available, which needed rolling onto alternative infrastructure and then testing .. hence 2 days ... and 20 hour days at that) to 3 months for it to be fully operational, but with bare bones stuff sorted within 2 weeks (enough for exams, paying bills, dealing with attendance).

 

Yes, some folk are a bit to lax in how harmful this could be, but others are too extreme. Schools can be very flexible things and run very bare bones for a certain amount of time. A school will be criticised more for closing because they had no MIS available than if they stayed open but had to be inventive (or use historic methods) when doing certain things.

 

Please, everyone, remember that data is *not* just electronic stuff housed in one data store.

[PhilNeal]

@superfletch I agree with many of the posts. @localzuk summed it up well. Not being able to track financial info is a very serious issue. Not being able to produce attendance records for a court case would be regarded as very serious. School funding is governed by returns - there have been cases of heads making up classes. How could you prove that the school funding claims are genuine?

 

I did love the comment that schools existed before computers - so what's the issue?

[tmcd35]

I did love the comment that schools existed before computers - so what's the issue?

 

Lol, since the comment was mine I feel compelled to respond, if not only because you've taken it a little out of context. I think @GrumbleDook has articulated my view on this perhaps a bit better than I can. I work quiet closely with much of this data so am reasonably aware of were and how easily much of it can be recaptured.

 

My point in that comment wasn't "so whats the issue", it was that schools can function on paper records in the short term. Paper records exist for key parts of the data. We have paper registers available for times when electronic fails.

 

Get a school up and running, able to function, able to teach shouldn't take long at all. Rebuilding a complete and reliable database - thats what will take time.

[GREED]

U mmmm.... times have changed? Could a school REALLY survive for any real length of time on paper again these days? Could some of us survive (professionally) with a mobile phone or Internet... or kids without Facebook. It is what the world have evolved to and how it can cope without a core element now it is so accustom to it.

[elsiegee40]

If a school got in to this mess, it would survive. The children have to learn. It wouldn't be pretty and it wouldn't be easy, but the core business of teaching can still continue. There would be a lot of flack flying, but the school could survive and rebuild. They wouldn't be without a server forever.

 

Schools burn down and come back... Remember Little-Miss' s school? . Servers can be lost without back ups. Things would be total chaos, but the children have to learn

Edited September 19, 2014 by elsiegee40

[GREED]

When I say survive I mean give the kids a decent education. Not necessarily close. Surely that has to be the sole and core concern, how the kids at the school at that time will be affected... An education is not the same as a good education!