Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue and for giving us the opportunity to discuss it and to deal with some of his concerns. I agree that parents are concerned. There is misinformation and exaggeration associated with this issue.

It has long been recognised that there is a need for individualised pupil information to be collected at primary level to fulfil our requirements as a Department to ensure that every child of compulsory school age in the State is in receipt of an education and to allow us to monitor the progress of pupils through the system in order that we can develop an evidence-based educational policy. Such a system has been called for from sources as varied as schools, the National Parents' Council, school management bodies and unions, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the National Economic and Social Forum, the Central Statistics Office, and groups and charities working for children. The current system of record-keeping and data collection means that information provided to the Department from primary schools is quite often out of date by the time it is eventually processed and passed to areas that need it such as the inspectorate, school governance, forward planning and various grant payment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.

The proposed primary online database will allow the Department to have access to timely and relevant information about the stocks and flows of pupils in our primary schools. This 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 to reduce form filling, red tape, and the duplication of information requests, thus allowing school staff to focus more on their primary objectives of educating our children. Individualised student databases are now commonplace across the Irish education system, as well as in other countries. Individualised data coverage is already in place at pre-primary, post-primary and third level education and a system is currently being developed to cover the further education sector.

I understand that people have concerns about the confidentiality of their children's data. From the point of view of data security, this data will be accessible only by a small number of people in the Department and it is stored securely on a server protected by Government firewalls.

The Deputy has raised genuine issues relating to the secure storage of the data in schools. I will revert to the Deputy with further information to allay any fears. The current retention policy for the primary online database, POD, data is for records to be maintained up to a pupil's 30th birthday. In future, schools will no longer be required to keep the official pupil registration book in paper format. Therefore, POD will be the official register of pupils in schools and the data will be retained to allow pupils to obtain their official enrolment records in the future, should they require them for any reason. The Department will continue to review its retention policy for pupil data in consultation with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Discussions are continuing with the Data Protection Commissioner. The Deputy asked if the Data Protection Commissioner is aware of this policy and I believe he is. There is ongoing engagement with his office on the implementation of this policy.

The Department's retention policy is for audit and accounting purposes as pupils' data will be used in the allocation of teaching posts and funding to schools.

The policy also serves to trace retention trends in the education system and is important for longitudinal research and policy formation as well as being an important statistical indicator nationally and internationally. Aggregate and not individual data is used for the majority of these purposes.

The Department takes confidentiality very seriously and the pupil data are stored securely in the Department's Oracle database. This database is hosted on the Department servers, which are located in the Revenue Commissioners' data centre on St. John's Road. Access to the server is protected by Revenue and Government firewalls. Staff of the Revenue Commissioners do not have access to the data on the database. The primary online database, POD, application roles developed 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 numbers fewer than 15 people. No agency or other Department will have direct access to the primary online database.

It is important that people realise the information is to be of use to plan services. I listened to much of the debate about the restoration of PPS numbers and the debacle with Irish Water. Every Deputy knows that every day of the week we use PPS numbers in our offices. The first thing people who come to our offices do is give us their PPS number to help us do our work. As practitioners we use PPS numbers every day of the week, but some people in the House use every occasion to stir up people's emotions about the use of PPS numbers. Go into any Deputy's office and I guarantee that the first thing one will be asked for is one's PPS number. It is like one's address in some ways. It is one's identification number for access to information which people use in all Departments. We must be secure, and data protection issues are very important, but the hysteria generated about the use of PPS numbers is hard to take from some Deputies who use the information themselves every day. I have no problem with other issues of concern, and Deputy McConalogue is raising genuine concerns which need to be dealt with and explained. I wanted to address the PPS number issue because it is exaggerated by people in the House who know well how they are used.

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