EdLaw
Victoria — Department of Education Schools' privacy policy
The policy that "explains how Victorian government schools collect and manage personal and health information" (summary). It is a departmental policy: every Victorian government school must adopt it, link it from the school website and remove any school-specific privacy policy (Vic DE Privacy and Information Sharing — Details). It sets out, under the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic) and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic), what schools collect, how and why, when they use or disclose it, how student information moves between schools, and how it is stored and secured. The page was last updated 27 March 2026 ("Updated 27 March 2026", vic.gov.au — Schools' privacy policy, read 2026-10-08); it gives no separate effective date for this version.
Applicability to EdTech
- Service providers must comply (introduction): "All staff including contractors, service providers and volunteers of the department, and all Victorian government schools (schools), must comply with Victorian privacy law and this policy." A supplier handling school information is named directly.
- Software is a collection channel (What information do we collect?; How do we collect this information?): schools collect information about people "using school or departmental systems (such as school networks or school-acquired software)", and "through online tools: such as apps and other software used by schools", CCTV and recordings. What a product collects is therefore within the policy.
- Consent for new software (Consent processes): some consents are "for a specific purpose such as to collect information for a school event or use of a new software application".
- Disclosure outside the department (When do we use or disclose information?): enrolment information "will not be disclosed beyond the department without consent, unless such disclosure is lawful"; other uses are limited to primary and expected secondary purposes, safety, legal requirements, the information-sharing schemes, law enforcement, de-identified research and legal claims.
- Assessment of software and providers (Storing and securing information): schools "are provided with tools and information to help them assess software and contracted service providers for privacy and information handling risk", and Privacy Impact Assessments "help schools to assess third party software used in a school that handles personal, sensitive or health information" (the PIA guidance is in Vic DE Privacy and Information Sharing). The same section notes that the EU GDPR "applies to international students from the EU".
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| SCHOOLS-PRIVACY-POLICY.md | The whole policy as published on vic.gov.au: summary and introduction; Definitions; what, how and why information is collected; use and disclosure; unique identifiers; student transfers; NAPLAN results; complaints; access; storing and securing; updating information |
Scope note: the page's "More information" links (the policy as DOCX and PDF, the information for parents) and the translations are not extracted. The Victorian privacy statutes themselves are not yet in the corpus.
Enforcement
Internal to the department, as a departmental policy schools must adopt. Complaints about a school's or the department's handling of personal information are managed under the department's privacy complaints process (Responding to complaints).
Licence
The page is published on vic.gov.au, whose footer "Copyright" link goes to the site's copyright statement (vic.gov.au/copyright, read 2026-10-08), which says: "The State of Victoria owns the copyright in all material produced for this website by the Department of Government Services. All material provided on this website is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, except: any images or branding, including the Victorian Coat of Arms and the Victorian Government logo content supplied by third parties." and "Material obtained from this website must be attributed as: © Copyright State Government of Victoria". The Department of Education's own statement (education.vic.gov.au/Pages/copyright.aspx, read 2026-10-08 for Vic DE Software and Administration Systems) likewise says its material "is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international licence".
Reading recorded: the licence sentence covers "All material provided on this website", and the policy is State of Victoria material published on that website, not content supplied by a third party; the department's own statement grants the same licence. Both point the same way, so the label is open-licence. (The PAL policy beside it is labelled restricted because no licence statement is linked from the PAL site; that reasoning does not apply here, where the site's statement is linked from the page.)
Conditions and how the corpus meets them: attribution: © Copyright State Government of Victoria, given here. Indicate changes: the fact document's Meta section describes the only change, a reformatting of the page into Markdown with the words unchanged. No images or branding are reproduced.
rights: open-licence.
Related
- Vic DE Privacy and Information Sharing — the PAL policy that requires schools to adopt this policy, and its guidance on consent, AI, PIAs and biometrics
- Vic DE Software and Administration Systems — the PAL gate for software not provided by the department (ST4S ratings)
- AU Privacy Act — Commonwealth privacy law. Victorian government schools are bound by the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic) and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic), which are not yet in the corpus.
- NSW DoE Privacy standards — the NSW counterpart
Sources
- vic.gov.au — Schools' privacy policy
- PAL — Privacy and Information Sharing: Policy, which requires schools to adopt it