Anyone who has sat in a school office and watched a Subject Access Request swallow a week will understand why Fisar caught our attention. SARs are rarely the job anyone was hired to do, yet they land on the same people who are already stretched, and the redaction work alone can be painstaking. Fisar takes that whole process and turns it into something a school can do in minutes, with an audit trail behind every decision.
What we like most is that it has been built alongside a trust rather than sold at one. South Pennine Academies Trust helped shape it, and it shows in how the workflow mirrors what actually happens in a school. The DPO keeps the final say on every redaction, so it supports professional judgement rather than replacing it.
For a single school it will save days of admin on every request. For a trust handling SARs at scale it could be transformational. If you are a headteacher, business manager or DPO who dreads that email landing, this is one we would recommend a conversation with.
Fisar completely automates the Subject Access Request process, reducing it from days to minutes with full GDPR compliance.
Subject Access Requests are one of the heaviest admin burdens a school can face. A single request can mean pulling records from multiple systems, redacting third-party and safeguarding information page by page, and getting everything out inside the statutory one-month deadline. For most schools that adds up to days of office, DPO and SLT time per request, and the requests are only increasing.
Fisar automates the whole process. It collates the records, applies compliant redactions and produces a response ready to send, in minutes rather than days. Every step is logged, so you have a complete audit trail if a parent or the ICO ever questions how a request was handled.
What that means for your school:
- Hours of staff time back on every request
- Statutory deadlines met without the last-minute scramble
- Accurate, consistent redaction of third-party and safeguarding data
- A documented, defensible process for every request
- No specialist training needed
Whether you're a single school or a multi-academy trust handling requests at scale, Fisar turns SARs from a recurring headache into a routine task.
"South Pennine's worked with Fisar to develop the application. It has been built with schools in mind from the very start."
Alison Black, CEO, South Pennine Academies Trust
As quoted by the DfE themselves, Fisar will save between £600m-£800m per year for the government. This equates to around 1.6% of schools' total budgets and will help to eliminate the 5m complaints in the backlog.