Live School Data - data link between Lancashire Education and Children's Services and all schools within the county

Lancashire County Council is working with Wonde to bring live attendance, exclusion and other data directly into the Local Authority from schools.

This presents an opportunity to improve data sharing, using the same technology that schools currently employ to share attendance data with the Department for Education (DfE).

The name given to this 'Live School Data Link' is the Wonde API.

These proposals relate to all schools in Lancashire, whether maintained, academies, free schools or independent schools.

We are now at the stage of onboarding schools. We expect the roll out to the rest of the county to be mostly completed during November 2024.

Why we are implementing this live data sharing solution

An effective data link will help both schools and the LA work more efficiently to fulfil statutory duties, to safeguard our children and young people and promote better outcomes.

Schools and local authorities have various statutory duties around notifications of students going on and coming off rolls, numbers on roll, school place availability, attendance, monitoring children missing education, and exclusions.

These requirements currently create an inefficient and unreliable administrative burden for both school staff and council teams, particularly where there are staff changes.

The live data link will ensure that children and their movements into and around the county can be more easily tracked to improve safeguarding and provide more accurate information to the Local Authority.

We envisage this solution will reduce administrative burdens for your admin team. It will mean that officers working in council teams such as attendance, CME, Virtual School for CLA and the Inclusion Service have access to accurate, current data rather than information that might otherwise be up to six months out of date.

The data to be collected

To summarise, there will be three data areas:

1. General child details changes (such as changes of address, starters, leavers).
2. Attendance including sessional attendance.
3. Exclusions.

This data is what was previously collected via the school census or sent to us manually.

You can see a full list of all data fields in your Wonde portal. This portal is where you will review the details of the data provided to the council and accept or reject the council's access to your school's data.

The list of data is also summarised in the Information Sharing Agreement available on your Wonde portal.

How the live data link will work

Wonde API will communicate with software installed on your SIMS server to automatically collect MIS data held by your school.

When a data request is sent, Wonde runs a SIMS report, extracts the data, and securely sends it to the council for processing.

The data will be collected overnight according to the agreed schedule with minimal school action needed. Most schools will already be syncing their attendance data with CPOMS, for example, in a similar manner.

For more detailed information, visit Wonde or email ems@lancashire.gov.uk.

Live data link setup

For schools already utilising Wonde for other reasons (Including the DfE's sessional attendance data collection), the process is as easy as accepting the council's permission request on the Wonde portal.

For schools not yet utilising Wonde, the Wonde API team will contact school to install the app virtually. They will provide clear instructions and fully support your school through the setup process.

There is no cost for schools for installation or ongoing provision. The application and data link can be set up in a matter of minutes by the Wonde support team and does not require a visit to your site.

Data security and GDPR compliance

Lancashire County Council ensures that information is collected and maintained in a secure manner, compliant with Data Protection obligations.

The council understands the importance of the personal data that Lancashire schools provide, and we give assurance that all necessary security measures will be in place to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the information provided.

Prior to sharing any data with the council, you and your Data Protection Officer are expected to read through the Information Sharing Agreement on your Wonde portal. This agreement has been checked and signed off by Lancashire County Council's Data Protection Officer.

Consent

Consent is not an issue in this respect as both schools and the LA have many statutory and reporting obligations when educating children. Therefore, our condition for sharing and processing is not consent, but is our legal obligation (such as The Children Act or Education Act), or because we are acting in the public interest or exercising a public task in our official authority. Your privacy notice should explain this sharing already as this is not new processing; it is simply a more efficient method of collection.

If you have any queries ask your data protection officer or the Information Governance Team at informationgovernance@lancashire.gov.uk

Troubleshooting

Our teams at the council are available to help, but should there be any issues, the Wonde onboarding team will be in touch to support reinitiating/fixing the connection.

Contact Us

Any questions you may have, please email them to ems@lancashire.gov.uk and we will be happy to help.