How is data managed at Arbor?

Why is data stored?

Schools are required to store children's data in order to provide them with an education and to comply with reporting requirements to the Department for Education e.g for the Census. Arbor processes that data on the school's behalf.

The school should have a privacy notice in place with students and guardians under the GDPR regulation of 2018. Schools usually send these out to be signed by parents when new families join. New users of Arbor must also accept our Terms and Conditions.

We do occasionally share data statistics with certain governing bodies such as the Department for Education. However, any data shared in these instances is aggregate data and does not include any individual or personal information. We never share any personally identifiable data.

Who manages the data?

The retention of data is managed by the school. Arbor provides the school with tools to allow them to do this, under the Data Protection Act (DPA). The DPA is designed to protect the privacy of individuals by requiring any personal information about an individual to be processed securely and confidentially.

In a school setting, this includes information relating to both staff and pupils. Schools must obtain, store, share, or use personal data securely, as personal data is sensitive and private. Students, guardians and staff have the right to know how their information is used and to feel confident that it is protected.

Data retention can be managed by the school through Arbor: Managing data retention for your MIS data

How does Arbor keep schools' data secure?

For an overview of how we protect schools' data, visit this article: Arbor's Data Protection Policies to comply with GDPR.

How long is data stored?

If your school deletes data from their site, such as a profile picture, we do not retain the deleted data.

Data is stored in our servers only as long as the school has a contract with us. When a school's contract ends with Arbor, we provide the school with that data so that they can move it into another MIS. All data is then deleted 90 days after the license end date.