Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to his letter to the honorable Member for righton, Pavillion dated April 7 2020, reference 2020-0008728POGibb, if he will publish the basis on which he determined that the Information Commissioner’s Office was content with the proposals for the reception baseline assessment’s use of data; what assessment he has made of the compatibility of the contents of that letter with the statement made by the Information Commissioner on 14 May 2020 that its r review of the Reception Baseline Assessment's use of data was still ongoing and that it had not made a definitive decision or made a comment whether we are content or not with this”; and if he will make a statement.

The Department submitted an Article 36(4) consultation with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in December 2019, where it was confirmed that the ICO would continue to monitor the reception baseline assessment (RBA) through its relationship with the officials working on the national pupil database (NPD). The Department is unaware of any statement made by the Information Commissioner on 14 May 2020 and we have confirmed with the ICO that no statement about the RBA was made on this date. No comment can therefore be made on this. Information on the RBA and the RBA privacy notices can be found here: https://www.nfer.ac.uk/for-schools/participate-in-research/information-about-the-201920-reception-baseline-assessment-pilot/.