Written evidence to be reported to the House
Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
John Freeman: The biggest system being implemented at the moment is ContactPoint, which is best described as 150 interconnected databases, each one at a local authority level. It will therefore have a record of all young people at the most basic level. That needs to tie into and be tied into other databases from Connexions and, indeed, from school and college records in an effective way, so that we are able to point up where individual young people are at any given time. I suppose that it needs to be pretty robust, which is the point that I am making. I accept that the need for that, because what do you do if you do not have a child or young person on this system? How do you know where they are? You need to be sufficiently robust to know that if they are not in Bristol they might be in Wiltshire, if they are not in Wiltshire they might be in Dorset. We need to have across-authority systems that are robust.