The Department for Education gives away millions of children's identifying school records to companies without families' permission. That's wrong. We want it to stop.

It's our personal lives from birth, our records of success and failure, our disabilities, our adoption from care, our mental and physical health indicators, name, address, date-of-birth and much more.

Private and family life means protection from unnecessary intrusions from the State – it’s literally none of their business, but they have created a market in which third-parties and companies pass around the details of our children's digital lives without our permission.

Email your MP and tell them what matters to you. Ask them to stand up for children and family rights and stop the commercial exploitation of children's education data. It's time to ask us for consent.

3 simple steps:

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The Department for Education gives away millions of children's identifying school records to companies without families' permission. That's wrong. We want that to stop. 
            
Since 2012, when Michael Gove changed the law to let the Department for Education ("DfE") distribute identifying pupil-level extracts from the National Pupil Database to “maximise the value of this rich dataset,” to “ help stimulate the market for innovative tools and services," it has been unsafe. A 2020 audit by the Information Commissioner’s Office found among the required 139 actions, that the DfE are not fulfilling the first principle of the GDPR, that data shall be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner.

It is policy-by-design to give away pupils’ identifying and sensitive data for the purposes of creating a market. That market has even included gambling companies onboarding new gamblers. Because once you distribute data and relinquish control and oversight of access, you have no idea who will do what. The Information Commissioner has reprimanded the DfE over that breach of the Learner Records Service exposed in 2020, and said that the severity warranted a £10M fine, but that it was counter- productive to do that in the public sector.
              
I was shocked to discover that my children's personal details can be given away without my permission or even being told about it. The children's rights organisation, Defend Digital Me's 2018 poll of parents found few knew about the National Pupil Database and nearly all of us wanted to be asked for consent and a choice before the identifying data could be given away to third-parties.

These individual-level records can contain not only all our personal details and home address, but highly sensitive physical and mental health data, details of SEND and indicators of adoption, active military families, youth offenders, youth pregnancy, and much more. Even sexual orientation and religion can be added into the named records from UCAS applications' equality monitoring data.
              
This is a gross abuse of trust. A failure of accountability. A breach of professional confidentiality. A prolonged negligence and failure to comply with the law. So how do children and their families hold the DfE to account and get this prolonged misuse to end? Here is what must change.
              
1. Data should be used only in secure settings, distributing access, not the data itself.
2. The DfE must tell families of the 9 million children in school today, where their children’s records have gone, and are going, to which third parties, how long they will have it for, and why. 
3. The DfE must also tell adults who have left school since 2012 in the data. 
4. An opt-in choice must ensure families' right to choose in future if their child’s record is used for anything beyond their own education and how. The right to object must be honoured and start with opt-in to ensure privacy by-design-and-default.  
5. The Department must stop new expansions without public consultation (such as adding sexual orientation and religion collected from equality monitoring in student UCAS applications, to named national records).
	  
A right to education should not have to mean data exploitation is an acceptable consequence.

We need your help. We are asking the Secretary of State, Gillian Keegan, and the Schools Minister Nick Gibb, to change the way pupil data is handled and follow the 5-step plan set out above.

Please help to create a safe, fair and trustworthy digital environment in education, fit for children's future.

Thank you.

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Tell your MP. Hands off our children's school records.

3 simple steps:

Copy this email:

Enter your postcode below to find your MP:

Send your MP an email!