Background
West Nottinghamshire College provides further education and training across all major industry sectors. Welcoming almost 11,000 full- and part-time students each year to their state-of-the-art facilities, their mission is to provide the skills that students, employer partners, and the wider community need to thrive.
The College recognised it did not have the in-house knowledge required to meet GDPR obligations and initially approached The DPO Centre in 2018 for expert advice. Since then, the DPO Centre has provided ongoing support to help the college implement and maintain an effective data protection framework.
Key Challenges
- Delivering GDPR training
- Improving DSAR awareness
- Embedding DPIAs into processes
Solution
The DPO Centre conducted an initial compliance audit and supported the development of a core suite of data protection policies, which are now part of an established review cycle. An introduction to these policies was added to the college’s onboarding package, ensuring new staff are aware of their data protection responsibilities from day one.
To ensure ongoing staff awareness, the designated DPO provides materials to support data protection reminders in the college’s internal newsletter and hosts practical awareness sessions delivered in team environments. These steps have supported the rollout of revised DSAR and breach management processes, helping staff to recognise requests and potential incidents and respond appropriately. Tailored training has also been delivered to senior managers to ensure they understand their additional data protection responsibilities.
The DPO helped the college implement a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) screening process as part of its software request workflow, ensuring data protection is considered from the outset when introducing new tools and systems. Any high-risk processing flagged during screening can be escalated for a full DPIA review by the DPO.
Outcome
Gavin Peake, Director of IT and Estates & Learning Resources at West Nottinghamshire College, said: ‘The DPO Centre came highly recommended from other education providers, and our experience with them over the last 7 years has been outstanding. Our dedicated DPO has not only helped us set up and regularly review our policies and processes but has helped us to embed a culture of safe data processing throughout our organisation. Whilst we remain on a journey to keep improving, we are confident that all our staff are now conscious of data protection in their everyday tasks and have the confidence to ask the right questions and ensure that they are not placing people’s data at risk.’
