Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 4 February 2015
146. Deputy Terence Flanagan asked the Minister for Education and Skills if she will address concerns regarding the new primary online database in respect of a person (details supplied) in Dublin 5; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [5068/15]
Amharc ar fhreagraPOD will collect information such as PPSN name, address date of birth, nationality, learning support status, Irish exemption status, standard and class, and also two optional pieces of sensitive personal data, ethnic or cultural background and religion, which require written consent. Individualised student information is already collected centrally at pre-primary, post-primary and third level education. The development of an individualised primary online database has been widely recognised for many years as being a key requirement to provide vital information on the educational welfare and progress of our primary school children. The current system of record keeping and data collection means that information provided to the Department from primary schools is quite out of date by the time it is eventually processed and passed to areas that need it such as the Inspectorate, School Governance, Forward Planning and various grant payment and teacher allocations areas. POD will allow the Department to have access to timely and relevant information about the stocks and flows of pupils in our primary schools, which will aid us tremendously in carrying out our functions and providing the best possible service to schools and pupils. Moving to an electronic system will also help to streamline administration at school level and reduce form filling, red tape, and the duplication of information requests, allowing school staff to focus more on their primary objective of educating our children. From the point of view of retaining the data up to the age of 30, the Department understands that there are concerns from a data protection and privacy point of view. The Department is considering these concerns but also needs to consider the fact that in the future POD will serve as the official record of primary school enrolment for everybody, and as such it forms part of an individual's personal history. While some people might prefer for their record to be deleted as soon as possible, others may prefer to have their record accessible should they want or need to get it in the future. The Department will consider it's retention policy bearing in mind these issues, as well as all the legal obligations on us in the areas of data protection and records management. Individuals also have the right under data protection legislation to request in writing to any public body that their records held by that body be removed or amended and their reasons for the request, and the public body must consider and respond to such requests within 40 days.
The Department takes the protection of pupil's data very seriously. Pupil data is stored securely in the Department's Oracle database. This database is hosted on the Department's servers which are located in the Revenue Commissioners data-centre in St Johns' Road. Access to the servers is protected by both Revenue and Government firewalls. Staff of the Revenue Commissioners do not have access to the data in the database. POD application roles have been developed which limit school staff to viewing and maintaining their own pupil records. Access within the Department to POD data is limited to the POD team which is currently less than 15 people. No agency or other Government Department will have direct access to the Primary Online Database.
The "Notes" area is for schools' use only, it will only be accessible to the school where the child is currently enrolled, and will not be transferrable from one school to the next if the child is moving school.
School's have the option to enter data directly into POD. In general Schools have found the system user friendly.The encryption process is in place for data security reasons. A facility is also currently being rolled out which will allow schools to securely upload the data directly to the Department, so schools will have the option to use that if they are finding the encryption process difficult.
The Department has repeatedly advised parents and schools who have contacted us that if a parent does not wish to put their child's details on POD that they should inform their school of this in writing. We have not in any way advised schools to transfer data against the parent's wishes.
While this is a new system coming into place at primary level, it is already very common practice in many other areas of the public sector and indeed elsewhere in the education system for somebody accessing a public service to be asked to provide a certain amount of information about themselves in order to receive the service, including their PPS number. In the education system, for example, in order to access the ECCE scheme parents must give a certain amount of information on their children to the pre-school in order to validate their eligibility, or in order to apply for and receive a student grant students must give information about themselves to the Department. POD will also allow the Department to ensure that it makes payments on the basis of each pupil only once, with the best will in the world duplicate enrolments can inadvertently occur in the system.
Apart from the need to ensure that going forward payments and allocations to schools are made on the basis of validated information, from an administrative point of view, it would be unworkable to operate any kind of grant payments, allocation system or even to compile vital statistics if we have a system where some pupils are on POD and then there needs to be some alternate method of collecting information on pupils who do not provide their details to POD. It's difficult to see how any such system could function in practice, either from the school's or Department's point of view.
