I propose to take Questions Nos. 154 and 155 together.
The legal basis for sharing the pupil data between schools and the Department is as laid out in Section 28 of the Education Welfare Act, which provides for the sharing of data for the purposes outlined in the act.
(1) The data controller of a prescribed body may supply personal data kept by him or her, or information extracted from such data, to the data controller of another prescribed body if he or she is satisfied that it will be used for a relevant purpose only.
(2) The data controller of a prescribed body may, for a relevant purpose only, keep and use personal data supplied to him or her under this section.
(3) In this section—"data controller" and "personal data" have the meanings assigned to them by the Data Protection Act, 1988;
"prescribed body" means a body prescribed by the Minister;
"relevant purpose" means the purpose of—
(a) recording a person's educational or training history or monitoring his or her educational or training progress in order to ascertain how best he or she may be assisted in availing of educational or training opportunities or in developing his or her full educational potential, or
(b) carrying out research into—
(i) the extent to which persons in receipt of, or who have received, a certain minimum education present for examinations to which Part VIII of the Act of 1998 applies, and the performance in such examinations of persons who so present,
(ii) the extent to which persons who have received a certain minimum education participate further in programmes of education, training or instruction, or
(iii) the general effectiveness of educational or training programmes.
The primary purpose of POD will be to monitor the education progress of primary pupils (in DES aided schools), throughout the primary system and onwards to post primary level and to help them develop their full educational potential. Once up and running other secondary purposes of POD will include becoming the basis for the allocation of teachers and capitation grants. Aggregated POD data will also be used for the production and publication of primary level statistics.
