Under legislation, a public body may disclose personal information for research or statistical purposes. Protection of privacy, however, must be ensured when data is reported.
To prevent associating statistical data with any identifiable individual, when reporting personal information, numbers or percentages are suppressed if they are elements of a population that are less than ten. When working with small population numbers, care is taken to suppress (mask) identifying information when reporting aggregated data.
This policy applies to all school, district and ministry staff involved with reporting personal information and any other organization reporting information provided by the ministry.