Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, United Left)
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145. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills to set out her views with regard to the primary online database of students personal public service numbers and other personal information; the reason there is a need for a centralisation of children's personal information online; who has access and the reason the information is being held until these students are 30 years of age. [3369/15]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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The Department has developed an individualised electronic database of primary school pupils (POD – the Primary Online Database). 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.

Individualised data coverage has already been in place for a number of years at pre-primary, post-primary and third level education who collect individual information on each pupil, including their PPSN.

A PPS number is an individual's unique identification number for all dealings with the Public Service, including Social Welfare, tax, education and health services. Having the PPSN on the database will help ensure that there are no duplicate records in the system i.e that two schools do not have the same child on their roll. In the future we will be able to track pupils from early childhood education, to primary school and onto post-primary, which will allow us to ensure that every child in the State of compulsory school age is in education.

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 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.

Figuring out which students don't make the transition from primary to post-primary is just one example of how this database could have enormous benefits for our citizens.