SIMS Parent App
Over the last couple of years, we have been working hard to improve our communication with you. Our web site has been redesigned and is updated regularly and you might also follow the regular posts made through our Facebook and Twitter social media channels. In addition, we have set up a text messaging service so that you can receive urgent notification for major school events and attendance updates.
The next step to providing you with important information is to introduce the SIMS Parent App. Parent App is primarily intended to provide relevant information for parents as a prompt for discussion between parent and child with NO obligation to follow up with a call to the school/ teacher.
Initially, the Parent App will be used to provide the following information:
- the school calendar and key dates;
- whole school messages;
- your son/ daughter’s timetable;
- details of their attendance and punctuality (app is usually updated at 10am and 2pm daily);
- electronic access to progress reports;
- electronic access to individual pupil targets and assessment marks;
- access to update your contact details to ensure that we always have the most up-to-date information in case of emergency (please note that there will be an approval check made for any changes and usually details can only be changed once in a 12-month period).
SIMS are continuing to develop the Parent App and in the future we might will consider adding access to additional features such as:
- information about conduct/behaviour;
- homework
- attendance information at Extra-curricular activities
We are really pleased to be able to enhance our home/school links in this efficient manner. The attached information gives some guidance to help you take the necessary steps to activate your Parent App account. It is free to download to an Apple phone (using the Apple App store), or any Android smartphone (from the Google Play store) but you can also gain access using any computer with internet access at www.sims-parent.co.uk . Further details about the Parent App and support guides will be available on the College web site at www.cullybackeycollege.org.uk .
Over the next few days you will receive an email from sims with a link inviting you to sign up for the app. It is important that you check your email for a link and sign up within 14 days as this link will expire. Please also check your junk/ trash mail for this email. It is intended that all school reports will be sent via this software from January 2019 onwards, so it is vital that you sign up and access this important information.
1. An email will be sent to you by the school, inviting you to become a SIMS Parent App user. You will receive a registration email from noreply@sims.co.uk containing a unique invitation code. If you have not yet received a registration email, please check your SPAM or JUNK folder. You don’t need to make a copy of the code as it will be entered for you.
2. Open the email and click the link as instructed. A new Internet browser window will open and you will be asked to Sign in.
3. Select an existing account of your choice with which you would like to register. Currently, only the options below are available to sign in. If you use a BT or Yahoo email for example, you will need to use another account type from the list below to sign in. Cullybackey College does not see or have any access to the account you use.
4. Having entered the username and password for the chosen account, you will see the SIMS Registration Form – this should autocomplete, with your name, chosen sign in account and Invitation Code. Select REGISTER.
5. You will then be asked for the date of birth of one of your children at the school, in the form DD/MM/YYYY (e.g. 07/09/1977). You may be asked for your own date of birth, but please use the date of birth of one of your children.
6. You have now registered for SIMS Parent. You can download the app from the Google Play or Apple App store by searching for Sims Parent.
Mobile App
7. Once you have downloaded SIMS Parent, you will be asked to sign in using your chosen log-in account details. Once you have registered you can also use www.sims-parent.co.uk from any web browser.
Internet Explorer
8. Once logged into the app, you will see a screen with options for: Attendance, Timetable, Reports and Data Collection. From the homepage you can select which of your children you would like to see details for. Reports will be made available in pdf form so these can be viewed on your phone, tablet or computer.
9. Key dates can be viewed in the calendar and any messages sent to you will be available under the Messages option. The Data Collection option is used to notify the school of any changes in your or your child’s details.
10. If you experience any technical difficulties, please contact the school office on 02825880771.
Introduction
The scope of this privacy notice covers the data processed within our SIMS Parent product.
Please see section 2 below for a breakdown of how we collect your data.
Capita Business Services Ltd are fully committed to keeping your information safe. This privacy notice explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, and how we use it. We hope our policy is clear and transparent, but if you have any questions, please get in touch via the contact details at the bottom of the page.
Contents
- Accountability
- Who collects your personal information
- What personal information do we collect
- How we use your personal information
- What our legal basis is for processing your personal information
- Where your data is stored
- Security of the data stored
- How long do we keep your personal information
- Who we share your personal information with
- Your rights
- Accessing your personal information
- Right to lodge a complaint
- Changes to our Privacy Notice
- Contacting us
1. Accountability
SIMS Parent is a software as a service solution that processes information on behalf of schools allowing schools to easily communicate with parents. Whether it’s sharing information such as attendance, or school reports, or sending reminders for homework tasks, all of the information is easily accessible from the convenience of their phone, tablet or PC.
Where your school is responsible for the information that is entered and maintained within the site, they are the Data Controller. Where your school are responsible for the information stored in the SIMS Parent system they must demonstrate compliance with data protection legislation. For further information on what personal information is stored and processed please contact your school.
Where SIMS Parent is the Data Controller, ESS are responsible for the information stored in the SIMS Parent system and must be able to demonstrate compliance with data protection legislation for the processing of personal information. Additionally ESS must demonstrate the same compliancy for any processing of your personal data.
The Information Commisioner’s Office website can be referenced for full details on responsibilities of data controllers and processors: https://ico.org.uk
2. Who collects your personal information?
Capita Business Services Ltd includes the brand of Capita Education Software Solutions (ESS) which sits within Capita Digital Software Solutions.
Capita ESS sits within the Capita Digital Software Solutions division and consists of the following business units: Capita SIMS; Capita SIMS Independent and International; Capita Libraries; Capita Micro Librarian Services (MLS); Capita Further & Higher Education (F&HE); and Capita IBS Schools.
All of the above business units operate under the trading name of Capita Business Services Ltd. Our registered company number is 02299747 and further information can be found in our legal statement.
Registered address: 71 Victoria Street, Westminster, London SW1H 0XA
Postal address: The Data Protection Officer, Capita plc, 71 Victoria Street, London, SW1H 0XA
Data Protection Officer: Jenny Coombes privacy@capita.co.uk
3. What personal information do we collect
As part of using SIMS Parent we collect session information from users accessing our system, this includes the use of third party technology Microsoft Application Insights. This will provide ESS with geo-location information, organisation information that the user is associated with and the user’s browser session information.
This information is used for the following reasons:
- To monitor the usage of our service and systems to support the development and enhancement of future features
- To assist ESS support and operations functions to tune their services to provide scalable and performant software using utilisation information of a period of time
- To enhance the security of the system by tracking suspicious and anomalous behaviour.
4. How we use your personal information
We may use your personal information for the following reasons:
- Support Enquiry where your school may have contacted us via telephone, email or other channels to log a support enquiry about an issue or for general assistance. We may use the data captured to help to resolve your enquiry and may contact you after for feedback to help improve the service offered.
- Improve performance and usability by getting insights on how SIMS Parent is used. SIMS Parent uses Microsoft Applications Insights to monitor the live service. Your use of
SIMS Parent may be captured by Microsoft Application and used to improve service performance and usability.
General enquiry or feedback where you may contacted us via telephone, email or other channels requesting information about products and services and we may use the data captured to help improve services or assist in finding a resolution to your enquiry.
5. What our legal basis is for processing your personal information
We will only collect and use your personal information (as described in section 4) in accordance with data protection legislation. Our legal basis for processing your personal information are as follows:
1. Contractual – We may process personal data associated to a contract or product purchase. It is important for us to hold this data in order to ensure that we have records from a legal perspective to whom signed and agreed to the terms of agreements and who to contact following issues and/or to send renewal information.
2. Consent – Where necessary we will only collect and process your personal information if you have given your consent for us to do so, for example, we will only send you certain marketing emails and process any sensitive information about you if we have your consent.
3. Legitimate Interests – We may use and process some of your personal information where we have conducted Legitimate Interest Assessment and have a legitimate business grounds for doing so. Under European privacy legislation here is a concept of “legitimate interests” as a justification for processing your personal information.
You have a right to object to our use of your personal information for these legitimate interests. Please see section 10 – Your rights and how to contact us for how to do this.
6. Where your data is stored
Data is stored within SIMS Parent in various forms, all using Microsoft Azure data constructs. Information interchange between software services within the applications is protected by a dedicated Secure Token Server (STS), so that access to all data is validated against the access rights of the requesting user.
Data sits within the EEA and is subject to EU model clauses, specifically data for these services reside in the EU: Ireland and the Netherlands.
7. Security of the data stored
SIMS Parent is a securely hosted web service, delivered via the web using standard HTTPS TCP/IP protocols. The SIMS Parent application is hosted on a secure and highly scalable managed service, with the main system hosting provided by Microsoft Azure® UK, which is reliable and resilient. Microsoft Windows Azure has G-Cloud Impact Level 2 (IL2) from the Cabinet Office for use across the UK Public Sector. All data is securely stored and processed within the EU and complies with UK data protection standards and requirements.
Our Microsoft Azure datacentres reside in Dublin (Ireland, UK) and all data is encrypted at rest and in transit and complies with ISO27001 standards. You can read more about Microsoft’s commitment and compliance to data privacy and security in their online Trust Center. For Capita MLS, Further and Higher Education and Libraries, your data is currently stored in other on-premise CRM systems, which we are moving into Dynamics 365 throughout 2018.
Technical hosting and management for SIMS Parent is undertaken fully by Capita on behalf of the establishment, including the provision of all software, maintenance operations, upgrades and background supporting processes. Application security is 256bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL), point-to-point encryption.
8. How long do we keep your personal information
All personal data will be held in accordance with Capita plc group policy, and historical records will not be held without legitimate reason. We have a variety of automated retention policies in place that ensure data is regularly cleared down within our system if it has not been used, updated or interacted with in a reasonable amount of time.
For instance if your child leaves the schools we will no longer process their information on the schools behalf and will delete this data from SIMS Parent following 30 days.
Essentially, we will only hold your personal information on our systems for the period necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this privacy notice or until a request has been made to delete it.
9. Who we share your personal information with
No information is shared with third parties.
Your personal information may be accessed by staff within Capita whom require access to this to carry out their job in order to provide services to you (this could be across various business units, but still operating solely under Capita Business Services Ltd).
Some staff within our businesses operate outside of the EEA, for example our staff in India, however all staff are subject to the same Group Information Security and Acceptable Usage policies.
In addition we sometimes need to provide access to technical support partners in order to receive support on IT projects relating to our enterprise business systems. Our current support partner also operates under Capita Business Services Ltd and thus is subject to the same Capita Group Information and Security Policies and Procedures.
10. Your rights
Under data protection legislation you have a number of rights in relation to your personal information. In relation to certain rights, we may ask you for information to confirm your identity and, where applicable, to help us to search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 30 days after we have received this information or, where no such information is required, after we have received your request. This section explains what they are and how you can use them, if you wish.
The right to be informed: As best practice ESS provide fair processing information. Please contact your schools in the first instance for what information SIMS Agora processes.
The right of access: This does not apply to ESS for SIMS Agora who act as a data processor and are not responsible for subject access requests for information stored in SIMS Agora, these are to be conducted by the customer, your school, as data controller.
The right to rectification: Where ESS are the data controller for information within SIMS Agora this can be edited by you. Outside of this right does not apply to ESS for SIMS Agora who act as a data processor and are not responsible for data subject data update requests for information stored in SIMS Agora, these are to be conducted by the customer, as data controller.
The right to erasure (also referred to as the “right to be forgotten”): As data controller, it is the customers, your schools, responsibility to respond to and act upon requests where the data subject has requested for the removal of information stored about them in SIMS Agora.
The right to restrict processing: Individuals who are associated with a customer may have the right to request that processing of their information is not processed. As data controller, the customer, must respond to such requests.
The right to data portability: As data controller, if applicable, it is the customer’s responsibility to respond to data subject requests to transfer their personal data to another controller or provide this directly to the individual. CSV export routines are available in SIMS Agora to allow the customer to export data.
ESS Data controller and individual’s rights: Where ESS is a data controller for information processed in business systems, customer portals and marketing platforms, individuals can exercise the relevant rights mentioned above. Please refer to the Capita SIMS Privacy Notice at https://www.capita-sims.co.uk/privacy-notice if you would like more information on this.
11. Accessing your personal information
You have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you. This is known as a Subject Access Request.
If you wish to request a copy of your personal information please address requests to dssdataprivacy@capita.co.uk
12. Right to lodge a complaint
You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) if you are concerned about the way we have processed your personal information. They can be contacted via:
Information Commissioner’s Office Wycliffe House
Water Lane Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Tel: 01625 545 700
13. Changes to our Privacy Notice
This Privacy Notice may be updated from time to time so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to us. If material changes are made to this Privacy Notice, we will provide a more prominent notice.
Last Edited: May 2018
14. Contacting us
If you any questions or comments regarding the content of this Privacy Notice, please contact:
dssdataprivacy@capita.co.uk
Or alternatively write to us at:
The Data Protection Officer Capita plc
71 Victoria Street
London
SW1H 0XA
