The DfE encourages maintained schools and academy trust boards to collect and publish diversity data about their boards and those of local committees. Information should be widely accessible to members of the school community, but schools and trusts must make sure that individuals can't be identified through the publication of the data, particularly when board member levels are low.
At GovernorHub we've widened the range of data we collect within the user profile area and provided an anonymous Board Diversity Data download so that boards can collect and report on board diversity safely and securely.
Below, we outline the measures we’re taking to appropriately protect our users’ privacy whilst we collect and report on what we're calling your 'Personal Information'. This consists of your date of birth, sex and gender identity, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, long-term conditions and education levels.
Data protection
Whilst the GovernorHub system already has robust data protection processes and systems, we've applied additional protection to this particular data set:
Access to a user's personal information data is restricted solely to that user:
Admins cannot see or update a user's personal information data;
In the normal course of business, GovernorHub team members do not access and will not change/update a user's personal information data;
Personal information data is held separately from other GovernorHub data so it cannot be accidentally accessed
Additional safeguards have been put in place to ensure the data is not inappropriately accessed
Anonymisation
At the point we process any personal information, our system has been designed to anonymise the data automatically:
Our system takes each piece of 'Personal Information' data and removes any link to the user or other data
i.e. your date of birth will be stored anonymously alongside other people's dates of birth rather than alongside your name, religion or sex etc.
The only thing known about each field value is which board it belongs to
Our report will only provide data for boards with more than three members
We have grouped the data
e.g. in a board of 3 people; instead of saying 1 person is 76, 1 person is 42 and 1 person is 49, we can say 2 people are between 20 and 49 years old and 1 is 50+
Reports will never reveal the number of people who answered the questions but instead will provide percentages
e.g. of those answering this question, 66% are 20-50 and 33% are 50+
Reporting
As this report aims to fulfil the DfE's requirements, we haven't restricted downloading to board admins. We have however added extra precautions to remind users to treat the data carefully:
The report will only contain data for board members allocated to the board's constitution (with a live term of office). This removes the need for those downloading to filter out data that isn't required
Reports will only generate if 3 or more members have filled in their personal information
The report will generate individual question areas (i.e date of birth, ethnicity) and will only show these areas if the minimum threshold of 3 members have filled in the information
e.g. if only two members entered their ethnicity data, then ethnicity would not be in the report as it doesn't meet the threshold
We've also been careful to remind users of their responsibilities when downloading board diversity data reports
More information
Read more about why we're doing this.
Find out more about the individual questions we're asking.