Privacy, cyber and data governance challenges facing the Australian education sector
Privacy, cyber and data governance challenges facing the Australian education sector
Schools have a unique risk profile due to the highly sensitive nature of the data they collect. With significant implications for data and privacy breaches, the education sector must continue to proactively navigate cyber threats and adopt emerging digital technology to protect their data.
Significant cyber security incidents have far-reaching consequences that affect students, staff and other stakeholders, disrupting operations and halting the daily functioning of schools, leading to a loss in productivity. Schools would also suffer reputational damage, loss of trust and negative publicity which can have severe long-term impacts.
Educators must be at the forefront of the current cyber security challenges in the education sector, ensuring that leadership not only implements security plans but continually assesses and improves them as cyber threats evolve.
Critical issues for schools from a data, cyber and governance perspective can include:
1. High Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data risk
Schools collect large amounts of personal information over many years. This includes both structured data, such as student names, addresses, results, and unstructured data formats, like emails and video recordings.
This accumulation of PII data poses significant risks, which could manifest as data breaches whereby cybercriminals target educational institutions specifically due to the sensitive nature of the data they hold, leading to the exposure of student and staff PII.
Without robust security measures in place, unauthorised individuals can access sensitive information with a high risk of misuse or identity theft. Security measures need to address targeted data breaches by cybercriminals, as well as accidental disclosure by the internal network such as human error in sending emails to the wrong recipients or misconfiguring data access settings.
If left exposed without any mitigation plans or internal training, data breaches can cause emotional and financial harm, and reputational damage among parents, students and the wider community.
2. Cyber threats
Educational institutions are prime targets for cyber-attacks due to the nature and volume of data they hold, as well as the potential for financial gain. These incidents often involve encrypting data and demanding ransom for its release, as well as phishing attacks and compromising user accounts to infiltrate educational institutions.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) disruption
The education sector is experiencing significant disruption following the surge in Generative AI across the entire school community and the associated security and privacy concerns. The recent data leak on AI-platform DeepSeek is a primary example, demonstrating the security risk that comes with using AI technologies.
4. Data governance maturity
While a school’s primary focus is to deliver educational outcomes for students, it’s increasingly critical to enhance data governance maturity to protect the school ecosystem and achieve these outcomes without disruption.
Data governance refers to the formal management of data assets within an organisation. It includes policies, procedures, and standards to ensure data quality, security and privacy. Maturity levels range from initial, which are ad hoc processes, to optimised, where processes are fully integrated and continuously improved.
Data governance maturity tends to be overlooked due to resource constraints. Schools often face budget and staffing limitations along with the challenge to gain buy-in from all key stakeholders.
How can schools stay protected from data and privacy critical incidents?
For schools to stay protected from data and privacy critical incidents, it’s essential to focus on robust data protection mechanisms.
Our recommendations include:
- Cyber risk management: Schools must stay vigilant and adopt comprehensive cyber security measures to protect against these threats. This includes regular security assessments, employee training, and the implementation of advanced security technologies.
- Data governance: Elevating data governance maturity is critical for schools, which should ideally strive to move from ad hoc processes to optimised data governance practices. While resource constraints and the need for internal adoption presents challenges, the consequences of not scaling data governance are far-reaching.
- Business Continuity Plans (BCPs): A robust continuity plan is essential for schools to avoid costly downtime and ensure resilience during unexpected events. BCPs should include IT disaster recovery strategies to protect critical infrastructure, school functions, and IT systems. A comprehensive plan should assess all risks, analyse their impact, define continuity strategies, and undergo real-world testing to ensure practical implementation.
How BDO can help
BDO’s team of digital experts understands the unique challenges facing the education sector in Australia and globally.
We specialise in crafting BCPs that are tailored to your institution’s requirements to build resilience during unexpected events. This way, you can ensure operations continue to run smoothly, protect critical infrastructure, and thrive amid the evolving digital environment.
Our experts can also help design AI strategies to prepare your school for AI adoption, implement data and information governance, and optimise IT operations to work smarter and significantly reduce costs. Contact us today to discover how we can support your school to become future-ready.