For Schools & Trust Leaders · Schools & Academies Show 2026
One calendar month from receipt to disclosure under the SAR timescale. Twenty working days for FOI. The records live across the MIS, OneDrive, SharePoint and a Google Drive, the safeguarding system, a paper archive, and Sarah's archived Outlook mailbox. The SBM/SBL handling it has four other pressing things on the desk that afternoon. None of this is unusual; all of it is the job.
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"Everything you hold about my child." Parental SARs often span pastoral notes, behavioural incidents, photographs, MIS extracts, registers, attendance, and email threads going back years. Ex-pupil SARs arrive years later; sometimes adversarial. The 30-day clock is a calendar month, not 30 working days.
State-sector schools and MATs in England are public authorities for FOI Act 2000 and EIR 2004. MAT-level FOIs intersect with school-level records. The 20-working-day deadline is non-negotiable. Section-21 (publication scheme), Section-40 (third-party personal data), and Section-41 (confidence) refusals are common; the audit trail matters.
From the local authority, the LADO, social services, the police. Narrow scope, high sensitivity. The audit trail must hold up to a regulator's questions later. The DSL signs off; the SBM/SBL prepares the pack.
A category of records that brings tribunal-level scrutiny. Parents requesting their child's SEND file expect completeness and accuracy. The line between the school's records and the LA's records is sometimes contested; the disclosure pack has to be defensible.
See /for-schools. Pricing: /pricing. SAR cost calculator: /sar-cost-calculator.
Public, plain-English, legally-reviewed by end of September 2026: AI Policy · Security overview · Telemetry transparency · Subprocessors · Vulnerability disclosure. Consistent with the Academy Trust Handbook's record-keeping expectations for MATs.
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