Sandwell Looked After Call

[Trojan]

The headteacher has received a letter from Sandwell council wanting us to install a piece of software on the MIS server to extract data about children that are in care.

 

Has anyone else heard of "Sandwell Looked After Call" and has anyone else received such a letter in a Birmingham school ?

 

Thanks.

[foofighterjim]

Not to my knowledge here, do Sandwell have any jurisdiction over your school? Or do you have any students from the Sandwell area?

 

All sounds a little suspect to me.

[ChickenDhansak]

This??

Looked After Call - Contact Group

[Trojan]

No they have no jurisdiction, we do have students from the sandwell authority though. I can't get any firm information on it so far, and I'm not installing a random piece of software on the MIS server until I do.

 

Link2ICT have no idea about it either..

 

Trying to contact the Data Protection Team at Birmingham...

[Trojan]

@ChickenDhansak yes that, but I don't know if I should install it.

[HappyAdmin]

I've had a similar letter regarding this piece of software on behalf of another authority. Personally, I'm pretty happy to install it as:

* the provider are a Capita Premier Partner (one of only 3, I think - and I have checked on the Capita site, not just read the letter) so hopefully won't mess up SIMS

* when I rang the technical contact given in our letter the phone was answered immediately by a person who could answer my question (another very good sign)

* this is going to save one of our staff a little time every day reporting some data over the phone.

 

I've checked with SLT and they are happy from a data/child protection viewpoint.

 

I'm going to install it next week.

 

Ben

[Sylv3r]

We've had some information from another LA where we have a LAC student who are running the same software.

 

As @HappyAdmin pointed out above, I too had some concerns but after running some questions past the guy on the end of the phone I was happy with the replies and so proceeded to install the software. This was around 6 weeks ago and to be honest i'd forgotten all about it until reading this thread.

[box_l]

I have seen this before, please be aware that the last time I checked the company was a data processor, not a data controller.

 

IANAL but..

 

I understand that this means that you, (your head teacher), will be liable should the data go walkies.

 

Just because the LA has entered into an agreement does not force you to do this.

 

Even if you do not install the software, and we have seen some that will not, even giving this information to them over the phone is the same.

 

The software is closed and you have no visibility of what data is transmitted. This is in some way to be expected as it is for vulnerable kids, however, you will be handing unknown data about these vulnerable kids to a company that appear to legally bear no responsibility should things go wrong.

 

Please make sure you SMT have read their T's & C's carefully before you do this. This is also a decision that your SMT have to take, not you, unless you are the officer for this type of data.

 

They do seem to have a good reputation though, and the software appears to work well.

 

I hope this helps.

Edited April 30, 2015 by box_l