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02 Sep 2008

Contactpoint delay and the non-screening of records

Sir Bonar’s post got me Googling what he’s in such a flap about. This will do, from Guardian Education:

The sudden postponement of the government’s flagship ContactPoint database last week was immediately shrugged off by ministers and civil servants as being due to technical problems. Embarrassing, perhaps, for a project costing the taxpayer £224m, but simply a matter of taking a bit more time to iron out glitches such as drop-down menus.

But an investigation by Education Guardian reveals much more fundamental concerns about hundreds of vulnerable children being put at risk because of flaws in the whole system, and raises questions over whether the government will ever get its ambitious project to work.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) insists: “We are working hard to iron out glitches before it goes out to users. This is not about security issues.”

But whether the database goes live next month as planned or in January, as children’s minister Kevin Brennan rather shamefacedly informed MPs last week, security issues surrounding data on children are precisely what a lot of teachers and social workers are deeply concerned about.

It’s worth reading the whole article. A way to describe the core problem might be (my words)

They were never going to shield the records of the children of hoi polloi. But they’ve realised they can’t even shield the records of the children of important people. Whoops.

This has the short-term palliative effect of delaying the risk to the rest of our children. Of course, if they wanted to shield the records of every child, they wouldn’t build a massive centralised database. And, pace Sir Bonar, they shouldn’t. But, regrettably, they are well intentioned control phreaks in a state of ecstatic groupthink.

• Posted by William Heath on 02/09/08 at 11:17pm
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Data nitwittery
• Comments (1)  Permalink

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