At Ocean Reef Primary School we aim to offer your child the widest range of learning opportunities and celebrate learning whenever possible. This may often require some form of parental consent. This form asks you to consent (or otherwise) to your child’s participation / use / access to several aspects of online learning.

The Department of Education has been working to review the websites, applications and services that are used in schools – Third Party Services. Each of these services involved risk because they hold personal information about the children, even if it’s just limited to their name. The review of the services has determined the level of risk dependent on the vendor’s security and privacy processes.

As a school, we have been required to audit the services used at ORPS. This form lists the applications under a variety of categories and requires you to give consent for the different levels of risk. There is also a link where you can see all of the websites and applications that we use as a school and the reports completed by the Department of A list of the data that is provided to the vendors will be included in the information.  An explanation of the categories can be found below.

Could I please ask you to complete the online permission form, with the link below, as soon as possible so that online resources can be finalised for your child. You will need to complete a separate form for every single child.

To explain further, Online Third-Party Services are provided to the school by a vendor, external to the Department of Education are free or paid services can include versions that may be downloaded onto staff and student devices.

 
These services provide functions such as:

school or student management
teacher administration
student learning content or activities
communication tools.

Online Third Party Services may require:

students or teachers to create separate student accounts
students to participate in online activities or upload content
students or teachers to provide personal student and/or parent information.

The Department have carried out a risk assessment on over 800 services and applications and still have many to go with new risk assessments are being added daily. For each service they have determined a level of risk-based upon the data that is collected, the security that the provider has in place, and the location of storage of the data, i.e. whether it is stored in Australia or overseas.  

The services have been categorised into different levels:

Notification: The school is required to notify you, as a parent, that a service is being used within the school.

Bundled: These are deemed low risk and parents are asked to give a general consent for us to use the applications within the school.

Explicit consent – These are still low risk but there may be aspects of the services’ terms and conditions that require explicit consent from adults for their children.

In Progress: A review has been started, the vendor has communicated with the Department but the school cannot use it until the process is complete.

Do Not Use: There are three reasons a service may have this status, the data-security risk may be very high, the vendor requires the user to be 18+ or the vendor has not responded to the Department’s request for information to complete the risk assessment.

Detailed reports about the risk of each application or website can be found at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12bTArTUe6tzdqxyVGEKxibvJPKxqqtYj?usp=sharing

Your permission will remain for the duration of your child's enrolment at Ocean Reef Primary School although updates to app and websites may required further permission from time to time.