The following has received a bit of publicity today.
Gillard flags national ID scheme for schoolchildren
February 24, 2010
The Federal Government plans to assign every schoolchild an individual identity number to track their academic progress.
Education Minister Julia Gillard is expected to unveil the plan in a speech at the National Press Club today.
Ms Gillard says the program will allow parents to monitor their children's development, even if they move schools.
She says the Government will ensure privacy is protected.
"If we have a way of tracking we can obviously have better measures of how schools are going in developing student performance," she said.
"And then for individual parents it obviously would be of assistance to be able to track the records of a child's schooling."
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says he has doubts about the plan.
More here:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/24/2828706.htm
So it seems all those lucky students will now have a both Health Identifier and a Student Identifier. I wonder which other sort of person they will think of next to number – people who are unemployed to see who gets work, people who are blond to see whether they are actually dumb or have more fun and so on.
One really wonders whether the cost of introduction and maintenance of such a system will actually return some real community benefits. Has anyone seen the business case and privacy impact statements?
That the Leader of the Opposition seems unkeen on this makes one wonder how the Opposition – with their Senate control – will approach the HI Service Legislation.
David.
3 comments:
I guess it will allow them to track attendance records, and dock the benefits of those parents struggling to get children to school.
FWIW, as the parent of a child with learning difficulties, the ability to change primary schools and start with a clean slate was invaluable. Once again, the real problem - the lack of specialist LD resources in public schools and inability to tailor teaching to individual students - won't be tackled, nor will there be any provision of wider community supports. I fear this will end up as a real "blame the child, blame the family" scenario.
Nope. This is mostly designed to allow a student's academic record to travel with them seamlessly if they move schools. Tinfoil hats at ease soldiers...
On the contrary, this is what Gillard said in her speech to the Press Club:
"My School shows the value of providing school level results, in context, to analyse how each school is performing. Just looking at how students in years 3 and 5 or in years 7 and 9 are performing at a given school can provide important indicators of student progress.
But after this year’s national test we will for the first time be in a position to see how the same children are progressing two years later, for example seeing how the grade 3 students tested in 2008 are now doing in grade 5 in 2010.
Obviously, children move schools so to track progress systematically, to focus on the progress made by each student, and to evaluate the performance of schools and teachers with full rigour, we need to be able to analyse the gains made by individual students from year to year.
That’s why we need a single number that will remain with a student throughout their schooling so we can ensure that each student's individual improvement, or where they are struggling, can be accurately followed across schools, systems or states.
The Rudd Government will introduce a ‘unique student identifier’ across Australia as soon as possible, so that the most rigorous measures of school improvement and valued added are developed.
I have asked ACARA to identify how, before the introduction of a unique student identifier, we can use existing records to measure the progress of students from year to year in the existing national testing data. With the cooperation of education authorities, and without identifying individual students, it should be possible to link national testing records so that student progress can be identified from year to year once the 2010 national test tests have been taken."
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