Hundreds of pupils contact details leaked after school accidentally shares spreadsheet

Tudor Grange Academy Kingshurst accidentally leaked the details of hundreds of pupils (Picture: BPM MEDIA)

A school has apologised after accidentally leaking the personal information of hundreds of children.

The leak happened at Tudor Grange Academy Kingshurst in Birmingham on Monday morning.

The name, year group, tutor group, date of birth, sex and parent contact number for all children in years 7 to 11 were sent alongside an email reminding parents that flu vaccinations are due.

One mum fears her child is now ‘at risk’ after the data was leaked.

She said: ‘It was sent as a message about the flu vaccination that students are due. When I clicked on the link, it came up as downloading.

‘When I looked at it, it had the whole of the school on it. I emailed the school about it and they said an error had been made.

‘The link had been removed from BromCom, which is an intranet system for the school. This put my child’s safety at risk.’

The school said the data breach happened between 9.50-9.59am on Monday morning, and that it has reported it to the school trust’s data protection officer, who is investigating.

A statement from the school said: ‘The breach involved the accidental disclosure of a spreadsheet that contained student name, date of birth, sex, parent contact telephone number of students in year 7 to year 11.

‘Our first step has been to contain the breach and we have done this by contacting Bromcom, our MIS provider (management information system) and ensuring that the SMS message has been removed from MCAS.

‘We are attempting to recall the message that was sent via email. If you have received this information, please delete as soon as possible.

‘We would like to apologise for this data breach and we have reported this to the Trust Data Protection Officer – Education data Hub who are investigating this breach.’

Last month hackers managed to breach a major Google database, leaving more than 2.5billion Gmail users at risk.

In June, more than 16billion passwords for accounts on Google, Facebook and Apple were leaked in ‘one of the largest data breaches ever’.

And hundreds of millions of pounds were spent on a secret scheme to relocate Afghan nationals whose personal details were leaked when data was mistakenly sent in an insecure email.

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