ContactPoint goes live

Written by Ian Summersgill

Last week the Government’s £224m ContactPoint database went “live” across 17 Local Authorities in the north west of England. By the end of the year almost 400,000 people will have access to data on every child in England.

If you are worried about the Government’s controversial new database (more information about which can be found here), you might like to sign the petition against it on the 10 Downing Street e-Petitions website. The petition already has over a thousand signatures, and you have until 6th September to sign up.

The Independent Schools Council has opposed ContactPoint since its inception on the very simple grounds that:

1. Holding information on over ten million children in England is an unjustified interference in the privacy of the overwhelming majority of children and their parents and/or carers
2. The register will hold poor quality and potentially misleading data
3. It will put children at increased risk through data being either stolen or lost
4. It is not likely to facilitate early intervention.

Data currently on ContactPoint comes from four exisiting Government databases: the Births, Deaths & Marriages register, the Child Benefit register, the NHS database and Maintained Sector school rolls. Most probably, then, your child is already on ContactPoint, whether you have been informed or not.

For more information, contact us.

There is also an Introduction to ContactPoint and FAQs in our Parent Zone

Related posts:

• ContactPoint review ignores independent schools’ concerns
• The Red Tape Peril
• Special Educational Needs (SEN) and Independent Schools
• A Bright Spark: ‘Gifted and Talented’ in the Independent Sector
• Why Schools are Charities

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 4:27 pm by Ian Summersgill and is filed under News, Politics, Private Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.