Anthony Lawlor (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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792. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills regarding the primary online database, if she will provide in tabular form the Government Departments including her Department, agencies and others who will have access to or are provided student information from the database; if she will provide a list of the precise information or parts of the system that each will have access to; the reason information should be retained until the child reaches the age of 30; if additional comments added at the discretion of the school will be visible to Departments, agencies and others or could be transferred as part of the process of migrating the student file to another school; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [1338/15]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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The Primary Online Database (POD) may only be accessed through password controlled accounts. Only the school that the pupil attends and a small number of Department staff will have access to an account. No agency or other Government Department will have access to the Primary Online Database.The Department proposes in the future to share some of the personal data stored on POD with other State bodies. These are: - Central Statistics Office, under the Statistics Acts to assist with the compilation of national statistics. - The National Council for Special Education, under the Education Welfare Act, in order to assist in supporting resource allocation in relation to pupils with special educational needs. - The Child and Family Agency, under the Education Welfare Act, to ensure that each child of compulsory school age is in receipt of an education. - To meet the Department's business needs in regard to the allocation of resources to schools, the Department will share a limited amount of each pupil's personal data, including a child's PPS number with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform PPSN validation service, or directly with the Department of Social Protection Client Identity Database area, in order to validate the identity of each pupil and ensure that the correct resource allocation is granted to each school.

The Department will put in place a data user agreement with each of these bodies, which includes the purpose for which the body requires the data, its storage, security and retention. The current retention policy for Primary Online Database (POD) data is for records to be maintained for the longer of either the period up to the pupil's 30th Birthday or for a period of ten years since the student was last enrolled in a primary school. In future schools will no longer be required to keep the Clárleabhar therefore POD will be the official register of pupils in schools and data will be retained to allow pupils to obtain their records in the future. The Department's retention policy is for audit and accounting purposes as pupils' data is used in the allocation of teaching posts and funding to schools. The policy also serves to trace retention trends in the education system, 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. This retention policy has been agreed with the Data Protection Commissioner and the Department is continually reviewing its retention policy for pupil data in consultation with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

The notes area on POD was suggested by the management bodies for schools that will use POD as their only administrative system for information which is required at school level only. This information does not transfer with the pupil to another school and once POD is fully operational this area will not be visible to Department users. Under no circumstances are the additional comments available to Departments, agencies or anyone outside of the pupil's current school.