What school data does Sparx need and why?

There is some essential data that we need to deliver our service to you and some optional data that you can also choose to share

Under the principle of data minimisation, we only collect data that is required to deliver our service to you. Below is a list of the data that is essential, what we use it for and what optional data fields can be provided for full functionality. The Data Fields are also listed in our Terms and Conditions > Data handling agreement > School data being processed.

UPN is an essential field that we use for student matching and troubleshooting

In Sparx Learning we use UPN:

For student matching (to ensure account continuity) when:

• A school changes MIS provider. We complete 100s of MIS migrations each year and UPN is the vital identifier to ensure we can match students
• A school needs to revert to a previous copy of its MIS data due to MIS problems
• We migrate certain schools that have previously not been able to set up an MIS integration (for example, where their MIS was not previously compatible with Wonde)

To assist with student account troubleshooting:

• For example, where 2 student's accounts have been overwritten, to deduplicate accounts for a student or resolution of a corrupt account resulting from MIS issues; and

To allow schools to:

• Match our attainment data with their own internal data where they ask us to transfer our data to them
• Transfer their internal exam results to us to assist with research projects that schools have specifically arranged to do so with Sparx

Our view is that the above use cases all fall within the scope of the DFE's UPN guidance, which permits schools to transfer UPN data to third-party providers of an education related service or system subject to the usual transfer controls (in this case, these are set out in our Sparx Learning Terms and Conditions).

Under the GDPR principle of accuracy, we use it in conjunction with other unique identifiers such as name, gender and date of birth to identify students. We need a combination as unfortunately, in practice 'unique' identifiers can be volatile and subject to change. Looking across all schools and the entirety of the changes recorded, UPN is 20 times less likely to change than the other unique IDs. 

Date of birth is an essential field which we use for logging in and data reports

Even though we know what class students are in and as a result what questions they should be set we still need dates of birth for the following reasons:

• When we used usernames and generated passwords we found that it became the job of the teacher to keep track of or disseminate login information so we chose not to use these
• Instead we decided to use first name, last name, date of birth, and gender to uniquely identify students in a school
• We also use the date of birth to band our statistics by age range, which is proving useful for reports and statistics sent to schools, and is also being used to help drive queries like "what are the skills most commonly set to 12-year-olds?" or "what do skills do year 10 students find most difficult? "

We use the gender of students to help uniquely identify students in a school

• It is a particularly useful identifier when differentiating between twins with the same initial, surname and date of birth should there be any issues with accounts
• We also use gender to differentiate our statistics, which is important for schools, especially those that are trying to overcome a skewed male-female divide in STEM subjects. The data we supply is being used to measure and monitor the skew
  

It is not currently possible to import genders other than male/female into Sparx

Equality is something that is fundamentally important to us here at Sparx. We have been working for several years to be able to support students with genders other than male/female. Whilst some MIS providers enable schools to record ‘non-binary,’ ‘agender’ or ‘other’, they do not make this data available for Wonde to pick up (it isn’t available in the MIS Application Programming Interface or API). Subsequently, Wonde doesn’t have that information to pass to us, although this is often requested and under review.

To be as inclusive as possible Sparx has taken the position of using gender-neutral pronouns (them/they) throughout our platform for all students.

Pupil Premium (PP), Free School Meal (FSM) and English as an Additional Language (EAL) data is useful for activity reports

Many schools find the activity report a powerful tool for monitoring these student groups, but it's important to note that sharing PP, FSM and EAL data with Sparx is not mandatory. 

• The activity report is a whole school report which is designed to help teachers easily identify where intervention is needed or praise is merited
• The report allows teachers to filter students by year, class or registration group and, where the data has been shared with us, teachers can also tick a box to include student demographic data (PP, FSM and EAL) within the report so that progress or achievement of these specific groups of students can be monitored
• More information can be found on our reporting page

It is also worth mentioning that student demographic data has previously been used in our published research at an aggregated level. We also want to assure you that any research we conduct is always based on anonymized data to protect student privacy. For example, to allow us to verify that pupil premium and free school meals students progress using Sparx Learning at broadly the same rate as non-PP/FSM students, halting the attainment gap. Gathering evidence to ensure our products are effective in increasing attainment is important to us, whilst prioritising the privacy and data protection of our students.