The School Census is a statutory data collection for all maintained (state-funded) schools in England. This includes nursery, primary, secondary, middle-deemed primary, middle-deemed secondary, local authority maintained special and non-maintained special schools, academies including free schools, studio schools and university technical colleges and city technology colleges. Service children's education schools also participate on a voluntary basis. Schools that are entirely privately funded are not included. It is a statutory obligation for schools to complete the census and schools must ask parents for information, tell parents and pupils where data are optional, and tell them what it will be used for before submitting it to Local Authorities or Department for Education. There is no obligation for parents or children to provide all of the data.
The census dataset contains approximately eight million records per year and includes variables on the pupil's personal data, including name, home postcode, gender, age, ethnicity, special educational needs, free school meals eligibility, as well as educational history and attainment results. The census also sends sensitive data to the Department for Education, such as absence, exclusions and their reasons, indicators of armed forces or linked to indicators of children in care. The data collected on children from age 2–19, three times a year, creates a "lifetime school record" of characteristics, testing and tracking, to form a single longitudinal record over time. This single central view of a child's personal confidential data and their educational achievement, behaviours and personal characteristics, is core to the National Pupil Database, a linked database controlled by the Department for Education.
The data collected for each individual pupil is listed in the National Pupil Database User Guide.
Data is retained indefinitely and in December 2015, the National Pupil Database contained 19,807,973 individual pupil records on a named basis.
It is "one of the richest education datasets in the world" according to the National Pupil Database (NPD) User Guide.
The school census expansion in 2016 to collect nationality data, first reported on in June 2016 in Schools Week, caused controversy.
History and coverage Prior to 2007, the Schools Census dataset was known as the Pupil Level Annual Schools Census (PLASC). Comprehensive PLASC data was first collected in 2002, including individual pupil names.
MPs in the House of Commons were assured on the changes to the "Central Pupil Database" in 2002 by then Minister of State for Education and Skills, Stephen Timms, that, "The Department has no interest in the identity of individual pupils as such, and will be using the database solely for statistical purposes, with only technical staff directly engaged in the data collation process having access to pupil names."
Frequency The School Census is submitted by schools on a termly basis, in three collections each school year. The on-roll "school census day" dates and the submission deadlines are determined by the Department for Education. The first is the Autumn School Census in October, the main collection is Spring Census collected in January when the Early Years Census is also collected, and the final of the academic year is the Summer School Census collected in May. The separate Key Stage attainment datasets are updated yearly.
School census expansion 2016–17 and nationality data controversy In 2016 the British government passed legislation to expand the school census to include the country of birth, nationality, and first language of every child.
On 31 October 2016, the House of Lords agreed after debate, with the regret motion on the expansion of the collection of pupil data:
When the expansion was announced The Department for Education had instructed schools to collect the new data beginning with the autumn census in October 2016. Many schools began collecting the new data before the school summer term 2016 ended, causing confusion and controversy. This expansion was to add to the data already collected, as listed in the Common basic data set (CBDS). and included further changes to existing items such as ethnicity and a unique property identifier: country of birth (Pupil country of birth, item 100565) added ethnicity and nationality, expanded to all children regardless of age (Nationality, 100564) multi-level detail expanded on English as an additional language, coded in five tiers pupil home address may automatically add a unique property identifier using BS7666 address format, in addition to the 5-line home address, and in addition to postcode which is already mandatory age of pupil from which data may be collected lowered to under 2, and previous restrictions on collecting ethnicity on under 5s were scrapped
Country of birth, nationality, first language, and ethnicity are all optional and can be returned as 'refused', 'not yet obtained', or 'not known'.
Legal changes and purposes The new collection was enabled through secondary legislation, known as a Statutory Instrument (SI). The Education (Pupil Information) (England) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2016 / 808 was laid before Parliament on 27 July 2016 and came into effect on 1 September 2016. This was during both parliamentary and school summer holidays and went without debate or scrutiny until after it came into effect.
In two parliamentary written questions (42842 and 42942) in July 2016, Nick Gibb MP, Schools Minister denied that the new data would be shared with other Government departments. "The data will be collected solely for the Department's internal use for the analytical, statistical and research purposes described above. There are currently no plans to share the data with other government departments unless we are legally required to do so. The Department have not consulted directly with parents regarding the changes to the school census."
In a July article, on the LSE Parenting for a Digital Future blog it was noted that, "There are no published plans how these data would facilitate targeting any support and this data item is not required for funding."
Concerns Campaigners were worried that some newspapers may use it to stigmatise schools attended by migrant children. Regional data have since been disclosed in 2017 into the public domain, to individuals, through Freedom of Information requests. Campaign groups, parents and teachers also warned that these data may be used for immigration enforcement purposes.
Over 20 organisations signed a letter in September 2016, to Justine Greening, calling on the Secretary of State for Education to reverse the policy of using school census data for immigration enforcement purposes, and the collection of nationality and country of birth at national level, and to commit to protecting all children from stigma, xenophobia, and violence. Under the coalition of Against Borders for Children, formed in September 2016; parents, teachers and campaigners began a national boycott of the expanded data collection in September 2016, supported by national human rights organisations, under the hashtag #BoycottSchoolCensus calling on schools and parents to refuse, retract, and resist the nationality data collection.
On 6 October 2016, a Freedom of Information request revealed that Education officials already had an agreement in place since July 2015 to share the personal details of up to 1,500 school children a month with the Home Office, for a range of Border Force purposes under section 24 or 24A of the Immigration Act 1971, or section 35 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004.
The National Union of Teachers, called for this use of pupil data by the HO to end, emphasising that "schools are not part of policing immigration". "Furthermore, we disapprove of the way in which information has been released from the National Pupil Database without informed consent. Government needs to ensure that use is consent based – again, so that relations between schools and parents are not compromised."
Intentions revealed The original Memorandum of Understanding outlined an agreement to transfer individual confidential data including "Nationality (once collected)" from up to 1,500 children a month from school census data at the Department for Education to the Home Office Removals Casework team. Data handed over includes home address, school address, name, gender and date of birth from up to the last 5 years of the pupil record. This agreement had been in place since July 2015, and before the census expansion was announced publicly in May 2016, and before the law was changed to permit nationality data collection effective from September 2016. The new version of the agreement, amended from 7 October 2016, removed the reference to nationality data. The existence of the agreements did not become public knowledge until published by the magazine Schools Week in December, and available on whatdotheyknow in February 2017. The agreement states that there is no legal requirement to share these data between departments.
This intended purpose was never included in the explanation given to schools, why the school census had been expanded to start collecting nationality data from children.
Corporate Watch note in the report of April 2017, that, "The memorandum states directly that it aims to: "create a hostile environment for those who seek to benefit from the abuse of immigration control." (Section 15.1.2).
On 10 October 2016 the Secretary-of-State, Justine Greening, had insisted in Education Questions that the collection of nationality data was; 'about making sure we have the right data and evidence to develop strong policy."
The extent of secret Home Office policy to access to pupil's home address was made public for the first time on 27 October 2016 in answer to a parliamentary question 48635 by Nick Gibb, School Standards Minister with a responsibility for education data. "Between July 2015 and September 2016 […] requests relating to a total of 2,462 individuals have been made by the Home Office to DfE and 520 records have been identified within DfE data and returned to the Home Office."
In December it was revealed through the publication of information in Cabinet Office letters leaked to the BBC, that it had decided in 2015 that nationality and country of birth would be collected from school children as a compromise, and that the then Education Secretary had to "fend off" more stringent Home Office plans to refuse school places of choice to migrant children, and to require passport data collection from every child in England.
Outcome In November 2016, in a government u-turn, the collection of nationality and country of birth was scrapped for the planned January 2017 Early Years Census, and not collected on children age 2–5 in non-school establishments in the January spring census 2017. It went ahead for 90% of children aged 19 and under, collected via the School Census.
Lord Nash told the House of Lords that the nationality data would be optional, and that parents could now retract it, if previously submitted.
"If parents have previously provided this information to schools and now wish to retract it, they should inform the school of this decision. For such cases, schools can update their systems to show a parent has refused to provide the information and this will be collected within the next school census."Parliamentary written question [null HL3296] asked by the Earl of Clancarty and answered by Lord Nash on November 24, 2016.
He also wrote to fellow Lords that since the new data were "too sensitive" to be merged with the National Pupil Database and released, the Department for Education would hold the new information separately from other data. It was later confirmed in May 2017 via FOI that this was called the 'I-store'.