Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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849. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the reason her Department plans to store PPS numbers of primary school pupils for 30 years; the plans her Department has in place to ensure the safety of this information; the number of persons who will have access to this information; the safeguards that are in place to ensure that there will be no breaches of confidentiality or data protection; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [1653/15]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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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 pupil's 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 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.

As Data Controllers, schools are obliged to inform the parents/guardians of their pupils that some of the data they collect with be passed to the Department, explain the purpose that the data is being collected for and outline how long it will be retained for and how it will be stored. Parental consent is also required to answer the questions relating to religion and ethnic or cultural background.