When Contactpoint was recently switched off, there was great glee among some home educators. What had been referred to by a number of parents as the 'de facto registration' of home educated children had ended. A cause for rejoicing indeed! This was monumentally selfish of home educating parents, because ContactPoint was in fact a brilliant idea, a tool which would certainly have saved lives. Let's look at why it was needed and what an unfortunate thing it was that the Coalition decided to scrap it.
Home educators displayed a good deal of pious hypocrisy about Khyra Ishaq's mother because when removing her daughter from school in order to home educate her, she did not comply with the Statutory Instrument 2006 No. 1751 - The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006. Hardly anybody apart from teachers even know about this obscure amendment to the law and it is generally ignored by most people. Anybody removing a child from school is supposed to give written notification and so on. Most parents who move house, change schools or go abroad do not do anything of the sort of course. They simply tell the child's teacher that the kid won't be back next term and there's an end to it. Herein lies the danger.
Let us see how children can vanish from sight and fall into harm's way. I have mentioned before the case of eight year-old Charmaine West, who was removed from her school by her stepmother and murdered. For over twenty years, nobody asked about the child. She had vanished and no one had even noticed! An even more disturbing case took place in Scotland in 2002. Five year old Danielle Reid was the daughter of a drug addict. This child was being abused by her mother's boyfriend and there was a fear that staff at the school were becoming suspicious about the bruises. The mother was worried that the child might tell somebody about what was happening. So in October 2002, her mother simply took her out of school, telling the school that they were moving to Manchester. Nobody bothered to check up and a month later the little girl was beaten to death and her body dumped in a canal.
It was to prevent cases like that of Charmaine West and Danielle Reid that ContactPoint was set up. The educational setting of every single child in Britain would have been known and it would no longer have been possible to remove a child from school with some vague story of moving house and without giving details of the child's new educational provision. The ostensible fear of many home educating parents was that this database would become a hunting ground for paedophiles, but this wasn't the real anxiety at all. In fact it was thought that all those home educated children who are currently, 'under the radar', as home educators call it, would have come to light. It would have been all but impossible for parents simply not to send their child to school at the age of five without somebody becoming aware of the fact and asking questions.
The problem is that the very laxness of the current system which enables home educators to keep their children from school without their local authority being aware of the fact, also provides a fantastic mechanism for those who are harming or murdering their children to escape notice as well. It was this that ContactPoint would have dealt with. So although home educating parents are very pleased at the scrapping of this supposedly intrusive database, they might bear in mind that it has almost certainly been done at the cost of the suffering and deaths of other children who were not being home educated. This seems a high price to pay, just so that a handful of parents may continue their chosen pedagogy without any oversight.
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Contactpoint was a typical 'obvious solution' response to a variety of problems experienced by local authorities relating to the exchange of information about children between agencies. On paper, the idea is brilliant. In practice, as anyone who has worked with large databases will tell you, it was a disaster waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteNever mind the possibility that sensitive information about vulnerable children might fall into the wrong hands, there are also the issue of accuracy of information. Identifying individuals accurately is problematic for large databases, especially when it involves children whose birth or family names have been changed, or the database fields don’t reflect the structure of names in minority ethnic communities, or names that are similar.
This problem can be overcome to an extent if the database is used only locally, because people working in one local agency soon get to know that “Jimmy Bloggs-Smith” is aka “James Bloggs”, but is not the same person as “Jimmy Smith-Bloggs” even though they have the same birthdate and live across the road from one another. This can be flagged with markers like ‘check mother’s maiden name’ or ‘check previous address’, or even ‘see Christobel before even considering taking any action’. With large databases used by multiple agencies, especially if they are widely geographically separate, the risk of multiple or conflated identities increases considerably, as does the risk of information being misunderstood.
Serious case reviews keep flagging up the same problems; telephone calls not returned, LA officers being on holiday, not understanding how other agencies work, procedures not being followed etc etc. All these problems suggest that public sector employees working with children at risk are overloaded, are not as well trained as they might be, and are often not familiar with the cases they are dealing with. There’s a national recruitment crisis in social work. In such circumstances, it’s inevitable that workloads will be too high and that incompetent or inexperienced social workers will be undertaking tasks that are beyond their capacity to handle. Having to keep a massive database up to date would simply have added to their workload.
For reasons I haven’t fathomed yet, the previous government had a misplaced faith in IT resolving organisational systems problems and Contactpoint was destined to be yet another endless drain on resources that would have been better spent elsewhere.
The problems with contactpoint are nothing to do with home education and everything to do with privacy and civil liberties. The criticisms were addressed at the time by restricting the amount of data in it: the whole thing ended up rocking back and forth between being too invasive and being too empty to be useful. There are plenty of objections from organsations such as Liberty, Foundation for Information Policy Research, Privacy International and the government's own Information Comissioner.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm pretty sure the ConLibs didnt scrap it for Homeschoolers' sake. You should be the last person to conflate Libertarian values with Home education!
Incidentally Contactpoint wasn't scrapped 'just so that a handful of parents may continue their chosen pedagogy without any oversight', as you well know. Its scrapping was nothing to do with home education, or the perceived (as distinct from actual) risk to HE children. It was because it was an expensive project that was unlikely to address the key problems.
ReplyDelete"And I'm pretty sure the ConLibs didnt scrap it for Homeschoolers' sake. "
ReplyDelete"Incidentally Contactpoint wasn't scrapped 'just so that a handful of parents may continue their chosen pedagogy without any oversight',"
I din't mean to suggest that home education had anything at all to do with the switching off of ContactPoint. The fact that the scrapping of this database has probably been done at the cost of children's lives and the fact that home educators were pleased about it are both true, but not connected. I would have done better to split these two points into two separate sentences.
But its not a fact that childrens lives would be saved by it! The current implementation was so hamstrung to be useless anyway. And if the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it were instead spent on front line social services, might more lives have been saved. In fact, it may even have cost lives.
ReplyDelete"In fact, it may even have cost lives. "
ReplyDeleteMore research needed about this, I fancy! How would ContactPoint have cost lives?
"if the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it were instead spent on front line social services, might more lives have been saved"
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's any doubt that social services in most local authority areas are overstretched. The issues flagged by serious case reviews are reflective of that fact.
ReplyDeleteBut instead of looking at the recruitment, retention and turnover issues that were leading to poor communication between agencies, the government decided to add another task on top of what already had to be handled. It's quite possible that reliance on an unreliable database, not to mention the additional workload it would cause, could have made the situation worse rather than better and put vulnerable children at increased risk.
I'm reposting this as I think the original went astray - comments posted after this have appeared on other threads.
ReplyDeleteSimon wrote,
"Hardly anybody apart from teachers even know about this obscure amendment to the law and it is generally ignored by most people. Anybody removing a child from school is supposed to give written notification and so on. Most parents who move house, change schools or go abroad do not do anything of the sort of course."
If you check the regulations, home education is the only reason for deletion from the admissions register that requires a written notification from the parent.
Deletions from Admission Register
8. —(1) The following are prescribed as the grounds on which the name of a pupil of compulsory school age shall be deleted from the admission register—
(d) in a case not falling within sub-paragraph (a) of this paragraph, that he has ceased to attend the school and the proprietor has received written notification from the parent that the pupil is receiving education otherwise than at school;
In other situations just ceasing to attend the school is sufficient reason. For example:
(e) except in the case of a boarder, that he has ceased to attend the school and no longer ordinarily resides at a place which is a reasonable distance from the school at which he is registered
I haven't read all through the regulations this time, but from memory, there is no requirement for parents to notify the authorities of the new school their child will attend if they move out of the area. Why not write it into regulations that a child can only be removed if they have registered at another school or have been removed to home educate? ContactPoint would not be necessary.
"The problem is that the very laxness of the current system which enables home educators to keep their children from school without their local authority being aware of the fact, also provides a fantastic mechanism for those who are harming or murdering their children to escape notice as well."
But where do you stop if you travel down this path? We could say that the laxness of not regularly observing children during the six weeks school holiday would enable this, or the lack of CCTV cameras in homes. Or maybe the lack of a requirement for children to daily log into a secure web site using iris recognition software so that we can be sure they are still alive. Where would you draw the line and why? As others have said, the main issues with ContactPoint were civil liberties and doubt that it would work as advertised and may even be harmful (wasn't it Eileen Munro who coined the needle in a haystack issue in connection with databases like this?).