Principals concerned over resources for Primary Online Database

Teachers and principals from dozens of schools around the country wrote to the Department of Education expressing frustration about aspects of the new Primary Online Database (POD) for children, including worries that they do not have time or resources to deal with it.

There were also fears about the way questions about ethnicity and cultural background were being recorded, and fears that in some cases “international families” would misunderstand the questions due to limited knowledge of English.

Some principals also told the department they feared they did not have appropriate IT skills to deal with the database and to encrypt it properly.

Many said they did not have the administrative resources to do the work.

The email correspondence between primary schools and the department was released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Many schools cited instances where parents had refused consent to having their children recorded on the database at all.

Some were also refusing to allow children’s PPS numbers to be recorded.

Although the numbers of outright refusals to be included appear to be small, one school told the department that only a quarter of the consent forms sent out for the database had been returned by January – months after its initial introduction.

Data breaches

A letter to another school from a parent expressed concern about the possibility of data breaches and said storing the paper consent forms in a filing cabinet did not provide sufficient security.

A principal in north Dublin noted one field in the database asked if English or Irish was spoken at home.

“Parents in this school will inadvertently answer ‘yes’,” the principal wrote.

She said children did not have “adequate English vocabulary to fully engage with the curriculum compared to their Irish peers”.

“My fear is that parents will feel compelled to answer the question that they indeed do speak English at home, which will then have an adverse effect on the teaching supports offered to schools . . . with such a large proportion of children who have little or no English coming to school.”

Other principals said they had participated in a pilot project for the database, but that the department had not taken on board their feedback.

One wrote to the department twice and said: “I would feel fairly aggrieved if the time that I took to pilot the programme had no impact or effect on the rolling out of POD, especially as this was done completely in my own time and for no reward.

“For this to simply be ignored would be very disappointing. However, I trust that the Department of Education would not engage in this manner so I look forward to hearing from you about the next steps so that POD reaches schools in a somewhat usable manner.”

The same principal later reiterated his offer to help.

“I really want POD to work and would urge you to get it right before you unleash it prematurely on an already stretched and negative audience,” he wrote.

The department also issued a wording to schools which it said could be used to convince “reluctant” parents to hand over their children’s data.

This included a warning that in future years there may be funding and teacher allocation implications for their child’s school.

One official in the primary online database section replied to a school’s query to say that if parents “choose to ignore you and do not send back the form or the written letter you may go ahead and input the data you already have in school”.

Correspondence to the department from the Department of Social Protection dated June 2014 raised the question of accessing the information on the POD system for the prevention and detection of fraud in social welfare payments.