The data warehouse for early childhood education and care (Varda) is a national data warehouse that contains information on early childhood education and care actors and units, the children attending early childhood education and care, the children´s guardians, early childhood education and care personnel and support provided in early childhood education and care. Provisions on the data warehouse are laid down in the Act on early childhood education and care (540/2018). The data stored in the data warehouse is used in performing the statutory official tasks, improving the efficiency of administration, developing early childhood education and care, making decisions, and in the evaluation, statistics, monitoring and research carried out in early childhood education and care. The data warehouse is maintained by Finnish National Agency for Education.
Under the Act on early childhood education and care, municipalities have the obligation to record information on the children in Varda as from 1 January 2019 and the personal data of children’s parents or other guardians (hereinafter the guardians) as from 1 September 2019. Additionally, a municipality have an obligation to save data on the numbers of administrative decisions concerning support provided in early childhood education and care from 2024 on.
The municipality records the following information in Varda about a child attending early childhood education and care:
Some of the information has been collected from the child’s guardians in connection with their application for a place in early childhood education and care, while some of it is recorded directly in Varda by the early childhood education and care organiser.
The following information on persons who have been entered in the Population Information System as guardians of children attending early childhood education and care is recorded in Varda:
Information on those parents in the child’s family who are not the child’s guardians is not recorded in Varda.
The learner ID is a permanent identifier issued by the Finnish National Agency for Education for individualising a person in the Agency’s services. The learner ID of the child and the guardian is used for updating the information on citizenship, gender, mother tongue, municipality of residence and contact details from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency.
City of Loviisa will transfer the information on the child attending early childhood education and care and the data on the guardians from the operational early childhood education and care information system CGI Vesa to Varda through system integration.
The Finnish National Agency for Education, municipalities act as controllers of Varda. The Data Protection Officer of the Finnish National Agency for Education is Jyrki Tuohela, tietosuoja(at)oph.fi. The Data Protection Officer of City of Loviisa is Melissa Longhurst, melissa.longhurst(at)loviisa.fi. The municipality acting as the controller is responsible for recordin the information in Varda and ensuring that the information is correct and up to date.
As a rule, the provisions on the disclosure of data or the production of sets of data on request laid down the Adt on the openness of government activities (621/1999) are not applied to the data warehouse. The information recorded in Varda may be disclosed for the statutory activities of the authorities. Information on the children is disclosed to the Social Insurance Institution of Finland as from 2020 and to Statistical Finland as from 2022. In addition, personal data may be disclosed for the purposes of scientific research. An up-to-date list of the authorities to which information from Varda is disclosed for official tasks can be found at https://wiki.eduuni.fi/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=190613234
Service providers participating in the maintenance and development of Varda have access to the personal data contained in Varda to the extent specified by the Finnish National Agency for Education.
The information on the child and the child’s guardians will be kept in the data warehouse until five years have elapsed since the end of the calendar year in which the child’s right to early childhood education and care ended. The learner ID and the unique identification data based on which the learner ID has been issued will be retained permanently.
The child’s guardian has the right to be informed about the processing of personal data of the child attending early childhood education and their own personal data and to have access to the personal data recorded in Varda, the right to rectify the information entered in Varda and the right to restrict the processing of the personal data. In addition, the guardian of a child registered in Varda has the right to file a complaint with the Data Protection Ombudsman. More detailed instructions for the implementation of the rights are available in the privacy statement (in Finnish) at https://opintopolku.fi/konfo/fi/sivu/varda-palvelun-tietosuojaseloste.
As a guardian, you can view the information that has been recorded about you or your child in Varda in the citizen’s view of Varda. You will find the citizen’s view in the My Studyinfo service of the Finnish National Agency for Education at https://opintopolku.fi/varda/login. Read the instructions for using the service at https://wiki.eduuni.fi/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=190613650. If it is not possible to use the electronic service, you can reguest the information recorded in Varda with a form. A link to the form can be found in Varda’s provacy statement (in Finnish).
