The Collection Of Data (2)

Following on from the previous post - and if you have not read that, please do so prior to continuing reading - I will now, courtesy of Heather Brooke's book 'The Silent State' detail some of the systems that exist in the purported aim of 'protecting children'.

National Childhood Obesity Database:

The largest of its kind in the world, containing the height and weight of every child from Year 1 to Year 6 - compiled since 2005.

The National Pupil Data Base:

The data held is information on name, age, address, ethnicity, special educational needs, entitlement to free school meals, whether the child is in care, behaviour and attendance.  This data is held on every pupil in state schools and state-funded nurseries and childcare and is shared with social workers and police.

Contact Point:

A national index of all English children, including biographical details and contact information along with notification of whether an in-depth assessment has been carried out. Initial set-up cost was £224million and the annual running cost is £44million from 2010/2011 onwards.

Common Assessment Framework - eCAF:

This is a personal profiling tool through which children who may need extra services, or that the state believes are not making progress towards the stated government childhood 'targets', are assessed by 'personal advisors'. This is an extensive programme and records not just facts but the subjective judgements about the child and family members. This is reproduced:

Almost a third of children in Britain are now assessed and profiled using this form. Many factors are subjective, based on the 'assessor' - which can be a childminder, teacher or any state employee - who may only 'know' the child from just one meeting - however they 'score' the child and its family. All this to ensure the child achieves a set of 'outcomes' dictated by the state. In doing this the state has set itself up as a 'partner in parenting' and defining the 'correct' way to raise a child. Guidance in 'Every Parent Matters' states "The role of government is to ensure that all parents........work in partnership with services to reinforce the benefits for their children's outcomes." That statement, in itself, shows that schools are no longer establishments for learning but are no more than factories of social engineering. Parents, witness the subjects now 'taught' in schools! What happened to the 'Three Rs'?

Integrated Children's Systems:

This is an electronic case-management system for use by social workers and is heavily weighted towards gathering the maximum data available.

ASSET:

This programme was introduced in 2000 across the youth justice system in England and Wales and whose purpose is to produce assessments designed to profile young offenders by examining contributory factors that first brought them into the criminal justice system. It involves Youth Offending Teams completing a 24 page Core Profile about education, family circumstances, living arrangements, lifestyle, substance abuse, physical and mental health, attitudes to offending and motivation to change. It is completed by a profiler who scores each category, the result of which is used to predict the likelihood of re-offending.

ONSET:

This gathers exactly the same information as ASSET in order to predict which children may/will offend in future.

Track back to 1999 when the government''s 'Social Exclusion Group' published a report called 'Bridging The Gap' which detailed the fact that around 161,000 children between 16 and 18 were not in education, employment or training - dubbed 'NEETS'. True to form, in order to solve the problem, the government decided to create a database. 'Careers Advisors' were replaced with 'personal advisors' who went far beyond helping children do well at school and then find a career. The 'personal advisors' were charged with overseeing every aspect of a child's life and that information was shared with other agencies.

The name of this new database was Connexions which was merely a pilot for the agenda in Every Child Matters - conceived in a Green Paper in 2003 and given birth by the Childrens Act 2004 - the idea being to share information on every child from birth. This was in fact merely rebranding an existing policy known as Identification, Referral and Tracking which then morphed into Information Sharing and Assessment. The Every Child Matters Green Paper proposed a database of all the details of every child in England and which is now called Contact Point.

Heather Brooke states "The assessment is meant to be a coluntary process done with consent, but in practice it's very difficult for families to access state services without agreeing to it. Also, the state has arbitrarily decided that children of twelve and older can give their own consent even if the law says otherwise." So we have a situation whereby the state defines these outcomes, not parents - who have not been asked their views on the state's self-selected role as a parent partner. It is obvious that all the above examples were 'dressed up' as child protection when it wasn't anything like that - it was a further means of state control over parents and children.

Michael Gove's new ideas involve 'parent power'. One wonders if that 'power' will involve the choice to remove the child - and themselves - from 'state intrusion'?

Welcome to state control of you, your children and your lives!

Ack: Heather Brooke - 'The Silent State'.