Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department conducted a privacy impact assessment about the collection of data on pregnancy, health and mental health for the Alternative Provision Census 2018.

Where a child of compulsory school age would not receive suitable education because of illness, exclusion or any other reason, local authorities have a duty to provide suitable ‘alternative provision’ (AP). Although the AP provider understands the reason for the child’s placement, as does the responsible local authority, nationally very little is known about these AP placements and the children who need them. This is fundamental to understanding the effectiveness of the AP system to better target policy interventions and improve the quality of education provided to these children.

Conducting a privacy impact assessment is not a legal requirement of the Data Protection Act. The changes to the AP census relate to information already required (and held) by local authorities during the process of commissioning placements in AP and do not require the collection of any additional information by local authorities or AP providers from the individuals. The AP census is a long-standing data collection with established protocols and processes in place for the handling, collection and disclosure of individual level information. As the AP census already collects a range of characteristic information about individuals, these additional items of information (about the same individuals) do not present any new privacy risks over and above those already present so a formal privacy impact assessment was not completed.