This document summarizes a presentation about the National Pupil Database (NPD) in the UK and issues around opening its personal student data. It notes that while the NPD was created to collect school-level data, it now contains increasing amounts of personal information on students without their consent. There are concerns that further opening this data could allow re-identification of individuals, especially when combined with other available data sources, compromising student privacy. The presentation argues that personal data and open data require different approaches to protect individuals.

1. Getting to grips with the National Pupil Database;
personal data in an Open Data world
Phil Booth and Terri Dowty | Open Data Institute Friday Lunchtime Lectures |15 Feb 2013

2. personal data ≠ open data

3. NPD: legislative underpinning
• Education Act ‘96 power to collect ‘school
level’ data
• Amended by Schedule 30 School Standards
and Framework Act 1998
• Created statutory gateway to collect personal
data about pupils
• Empowered secretary of state to define data
in regulations

4. NPD: 2
• No consent required - head teachers under
duty to supply information
• Data taken directly from school MIS
• Initially parents/children unaware - FPNs

5. Function Creep
• Original school census annual ('PLASC')
• Now taken each term
• Includes pre-school providers
• Incremental increase in personal data
• Exclusions and attendance data, poverty
markers, mode of travel to school...
The gift that keeps on giving?

6. NPD data tables

7. NPD request and data flows
TIER 1
DfE Data Individual pupil level:
Management identifying and/or identifiable
and highly sensitive
Advisory Panel
(DMAP)
TIER 2
Individual pupil level:
identifiable and sensitive, e.g.
‘recoded’ ethnicity, SEN, FSM
REQUEST
DfE Data
TIER 3
and Statistics Aggregate school level:
Division identifiable and sensitive,
DATA could have single counts
(DSD)
TIER 4
Individual pupil level:
identifiable, e.g.
gender, attainment, absences
Diagram based on NPD user guide and protocol, July 2012

8. DfE consultation: ‘widen access’ to NPD

9. educators the voluntary sector
“Data would only be released to
organisations which had been
profit-driven through a robust approval process political parties
enterprises and in accordance with strict terms and candidates
and conditions on data security,
handling and use.”
education publishers professional bodies
and developers
“We will achieve this through making people with
direct information from the National Pupil grudges
marketers Database available to all (with
appropriate safeguards in place so
individual pupils cannot be
researchers the media
identified), and developing a new
School Performance Data Portal.”
bullies
consultants

10. re-identification
• relatively easy outside urban areas when
combined with ward-level stats
• e.g. ethnicity + sector postcode narrow down
to handful of families (at most)
• + school year group can id individual child

11. ‘anonymisation’
• de-identification
• pseudonymisation
• “effectively anonymised”?
• aggregate data / statistics
• ‘Differential Privacy’…

12. identifying people

13. re-identifying people
NAFIS
IDENT1
NDNAD
GCSE + A LEVEL

14. • personal data ≠ open data
• obfuscation vs. consent
• (notification ≠ knowledge)
• ‘anonymisation’ vs. utility

15. thanks for listening
Phil Booth
phil@truth2power.org.uk
Terri Dowty
terri@truth2power.org.uk