Privacy Policy

This notice explains what the Assessment ePortal holds, why it holds it, who can see it, how long it is kept, and what you can ask of it. It rests on Republic Act No. 10173, the Data Privacy Act of 2012, and its Implementing Rules and Regulations.

The Schools Division of Zambales is the personal information controller for this portal, acting within the levels of governance set out in Republic Act No. 9155, the Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001.

The three tests we apply

The IRR of the Act requires that every use of personal data be transparent, serve a legitimate purpose, and be proportionate to it. In practice that means we ask three questions before a figure goes on a screen:

• Transparency. Could the person it describes read this page and recognise what we are doing with their data?
• Legitimate purpose. Does this serve the education of learners in this division, or is it merely interesting?
• Proportionality. Is this the least data that answers the question? A count almost always is, and a name almost never is.

What is held

• Accounts. Name, email address, position, school, and the roles the division has granted.
• Work you author. Lesson plans, Budgets of Work, assessment items, and Technical Assistance requests.
• Learner assessment records. Answers, marks and sittings for assessments taken through the portal.
• Published assessment figures. Division and school results from national and division assessments, as published.
• Course activity. Enrolment and completion for catch-up and remediation courses.
• Professional development. Learning Action Cell records under DepEd Order No. 35, s. 2016, individual development plans, and answers to training needs instruments.
• Activity records. Sign-ins and changes to records, kept so that a disputed change can be traced.

The Act classifies information about a person’s education as sensitive personal information. Learner assessment records are treated accordingly throughout.

Learners are children

Nearly every learner whose data this portal holds is a minor, and this is the part of the notice we would ask you to read twice.

• A learner’s results are visible to that learner and to their teacher. They are not published, not ranked against classmates, and not posted anywhere a class can see them.
• Catch-up and remediation courses exist because a learner is behind. A platform that turned that into a leaderboard would have taken a support and made it a punishment, so it does not.
• Names, sections and addresses of learners are not posted publicly, consistent with DepEd Memorandum No. 151, s. 2020.
• Enrolment in interventions under the ARAL Program — Republic Act No. 12028, implemented through DepEd Order No. 18, s. 2025 — follows school policy and parental consent.
• A minor exercises their rights under the Act through a parent or legal guardian. A request about a learner’s records should come from the parent or guardian, and we will verify who is asking before answering.

How assessment figures are used, and how they are not

The portal shows assessment results by division and by school so that support can be directed where it is needed. DepEd’s own guidance on reading these figures is that schools should not be ranked against one another, and that scores should not be compared across school years, because test difficulty, the schools sampled and the mode of administration all vary.

The dashboards order schools and show change between years, because a division cannot direct help without seeing where the need is. That ordering is a working tool for this office, not a judgement of a school and not a league table. Schools operate in different circumstances, and a figure alone explains none of them. Any use of these dashboards to rank, reward or penalise a school would be a misuse of them.

Who sees what

• You see your own work and your own results.
• A teacher sees the results of the learners they teach.
• A school head sees their school’s submissions and whether development work is happening. They do not see an individual teacher’s results from professional development instruments: a school head is a rater, and a tally of what somebody has completed is not a rating.
• Division staff see division and school figures for the work they are responsible for.
• Training needs analyses are reported as counts. Nobody is named in them.

Automated assistance

Parts of the portal can draft lesson plans and assessment items with the help of a language model. Where that happens:

• The request is made by this server, not by your browser, and the model is one the division has configured — which may be a service the division runs on its own hardware.
• Learner names are not sent. What is sent is the curriculum context of the task.
• Nothing drafted this way is used without a teacher reading and approving it. No decision about a learner or a teacher is made by an automated process alone.

How long it is kept

• Records stay; access goes. When somebody leaves, their access is withdrawn and their account is retired. Work they authored and assessments learners sat are not deleted, because deleting them would falsify the record of what was taught and what was sat.
• Learner school records are requested, transferred and released in accordance with DepEd Order No. 54, s. 2016.
• Enrolment data is disposed of in accordance with DepEd Order No. 35, s. 2022.
• Activity records are kept while they remain useful for tracing a disputed change, and no longer.

Where it is held, and how it is protected

• Access requires an account, and an account is granted a role that limits what it can reach.
• Only authorised division personnel and school staff have access to personal information, in line with what their role requires.
• Changes to records are logged.
• The portal is not open to search engines for anything behind sign-in.

Sharing

Personal data from this portal is not sold, and is not shared for advertising or research without a lawful basis. It is shared with the Regional Office and the Central Office where a report is required of this division, and with anyone else only where the law requires it. Requests for information under Executive Order No. 2, s. 2016 are handled through the DepEd Freedom of Information Manual, DepEd Order No. 72, s. 2016, and personal data is withheld where the exceptions apply.

What you may ask

Under the Act you may ask to be informed of what is held about you, to see it, to have what is wrong corrected, to object to a use of it, to have it erased or blocked where the Act allows, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to be compensated for damage caused by its misuse. Write to the Data Protection Officer below. We will acknowledge and tell you what we can do.

Data Protection Officer

The division has not yet named its Data Protection Officer on this page. Until it does, write to the office address above.

If we do not resolve it

You may complain to the National Privacy Commission — privacy.gov.ph, [email protected], +632 8234 2228. Please raise it with the Data Protection Officer first, since most questions are answered faster here.

Changes to this notice

When what the portal holds changes, this notice changes with it, and the date below changes too. Last reviewed: add the date when this page is approved.