#3132703, By brains Causing trouble at school? That's a DNA databasing

  • brains 16 Mar 2008 21:23:01 491 posts
    Seen 4 years ago
    Registered 9 years ago
    I currently work in IT for a local authority, working with school information management systems.

    Schools currently gather massive amounts of data on kids. Things such as: What ethnicity they are, how they travel to school, attendance, assessment, behavioural incidents, what they eat at lunch time and so on. Currently, a lot of this data stays in the school, doesn't get passed on to any agencies and is used for local management. Some schools already collect biometric data (fingerprints etc) to use for registration!!

    Some of the information is statutory, meaning that the school has a legal responsibility to collect it. Statutory information is collected 3 times a year in a termly school census. However there is a great deal of work going on to make live (or nearly live, maybe a week old at most) available to local authorities. Soon, I imagine live data will be passed regularly to central government. Meaning that the DFCSF will know within a week whether your child was late for school or was involved in some sort of behavioural incident.

    Bear in mind that the monopoly (there are others, but the biggest) school information system is produced by Capita. So don't worry too much cos it will probably never work properly!
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