ContactPoint Delay - Thank Goodness!

After the mess up with the Child Benefit CD's it appears that ministers might have seen a little sense by delaying by five-months the £224m system - ContactPoint. ContactPoint will hold name, address, date of birth, gender, parental contact information, details of school and any professionals working with the child. It does not include actual case records. The database came out of the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie and is designed to make it easier to co-ordinate the work of different child protection agencies.

Shadow Children’s Minister Maria Miller said: "The government should also use this opportunity to see whether it really is necessary to have a database for every single child in the country, accessible to 330,000 people, given the significant amount of concern that this could overload the system and lead to a dumbing down of information.

We as teachers will have access to it as well from the information that I've been told. It's times like this when I wish computers hadn't been invented.

Can we as parents (and I'm including me now) ask for our child's details not to appear on this database? This is just a nightmare waiting to happen!

Comments

[Richard]

I would be slightly cynical about this.
The project is struggling and rumours of a delay in the Contact point were rife before the loss of the child benefit data.
Sounds like a convent excuse to cover a project that has slipped due to consultants falling over each other and general bad management.

[Andrew Ross]

This may well be true - but either way I hope that it falls through. Too many people will have access to too much information!

[Dave Hill]

How much concern is there among teachers about ContactPoint and other child-related databases?