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Every week it seems there is a front-page headline proclaiming another government agency data stick lost, or a laptop stolen exposing personal details of thousands to persons unknown.  Clearly the amount of damage done will be limited to the nature of the data exposed and how accessible it is to those who have obtained it, but exposing personal data to persons unknown could be career-threatening.  Data that is encrypted to a suitable level will never present a security risk yet many teachers carry data sticks that contain personal details of pupils such as names, Unique Personal Numbers, details of academic achievement and behavioural/health issues - all wide open to the next person who picks up the mislaid data stick in the street.

Schools need to assess the risks of sensitive data being removed from their systems.  A Shropshire County Council policy for schools information security can be found here, and  Becta offers some Data Security advice for schools .  One of the basic Technological safeguards suggested is that removable data be encrypted.  Data encryption used to be a potentially arduous and expensive task.  It’s not so difficult or expensive any more and with this in mind it might be suggested that encrypting personal data held on portable devices is essential.  Becta offers a list of data encryption programs that are of varying ease to use.

Having just installed TrueCrypt I can confirm that this is a user-friendly program and I would be happy rolling out to teachers to encrypt data sticks.  It has versions for Mac OS-X, Windowsand Linux.  Data can be encrypted on an entire drive or simply within one folder/directory, and the ecrypted directory can be hidden altogether to prevent data from being demanded under duress (although I can’t see this being a problem with the majority of the kinds of information we have in education).

Now to think about an article concerning  encrypting emails…