Parents have reacted with anger after a school accidentally leaked the personal information of hundreds of children. Tudor Grange Academy Kingshurst in Birmingham mistakenly sent a spreadsheet containing the private details of all children in years 7 to 11 to all parents on a mailing list on Monday morning. The details included the pupils’ names, year groups, tutor groups, dates of birth, sex and parental contact numbers.
The school apologised for making the error in an email reminding parents to vaccinate their children against the flu and said they had immediately reported it to the school trust’s data protection officer. But one mum said she believed her child had been put “at risk” by the breach. “It was sent as a message about the flu vaccination that children are due,” she told BirminghamLive. “When I clicked the link, it came up as downloading. [The file] had the whole of the school on it. It had first names, year group, tutor group, contact number for the parents or carers, date of birth and sex … This put my child’s safety at risk.”
She said she had informed the school shortly after receiving the email and they were quick to admit to the mistake.
A spokesperson for Tudor Grange said the data breach had happened between 9.50am and 9.59am on Monday, and urged recipients to delete the email as soon as possible.
“The breach involved the accidental disclosure of a spreadsheet that contained student name, date of birth, sex [and] parent contact telephone number of students in year 7 to year 11,” they added.
“Our first step has been to contain the breach and we have done this by contacting Bromcom, our management information system provider and insuring the SMS message has been removed from My Child At School (MCAS).
“We are attempting to recall the message that was sent via email. If you have received this information, please delete as soon as possible.
“We would like to apologise for this data breach and we have reported this to the Trust Data Protection Officer – Education Data Hub, who are investigating this breach.”
While the Solihill secondary school’s information leak appeared to be linked to an employee error, such breaches have become more commonplace in recent years, with complex hacking teams behind recent big-name incidents.
Hackers breached a major Google database in August, leaving over 2.5 billion Gmail users at risk and in June, over 16 billion passwords for Facebook, Apple and Google Accounts were leaked in what was dubbed “one of the largest data breaches in history”.
