Joint working: ContactPoint - The verdict so far

Staff nurse Anita Croft recently used ContactPoint when a teenage girl came into the A&E department at Royal Bolton Hospital. The girl was brought in by a paramedic, after she had been found intoxicated, wandering around town with friends.

"She only gave us her name and date of birth but from that we could let her parents know that she had been admitted and also inform her school nurse," recalls Croft.

She also passed details of the admission on to the girl's social worker for further action - and it turned out this wasn't the first time something like this had happened.

Bolton is one of 17 early adopter local authority areas where staff have started using the ContactPoint database, along with national charities Barnardo's and Kids. The £224m directory helps practitioners find out who else is working with the same child, and was set up in response to the Laming inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbie.

The government believes a fully operational system could save at least five million hours of professionals' time, which is currently wasted trying to track down who else, if anyone, is helping the child.

But ContactPoint has been controversial from the outset. Concerns have been raised about just how secure the information held on children will be given the government's track record of data blunders, and whether the system will truly improve the way children are safeguarded. A report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in March said ContactPoint was "almost certainly illegal" because of privacy and security issues.

The Conservatives have said in no uncertain terms that they would scrap it if they win the next election, believing the system is a poor substitute for human judgment and the concept is simply flawed.

Shadow children's secretary Michael Gove says: "Creating more bureaucracy with sensitive information accessible to hundreds of thousands of people will do nothing to improve child protection."

Time saving

Nonetheless, the early adopters are now up and running and a small number of handpicked staff across the North West have been using the database for several months.

Croft, who has been using ContactPoint for 10 weeks, says the system has saved time. "It's useful to have all the information on one screen rather than having to ask the parents - they can find it frustrating and question why you want to know," she says. "Before, you had to ring around and you felt like you were chasing your tail the whole time. Now you can easily get the information, even with children from outside your area, and just ring them."

At the moment, ContactPoint holds only information kept on existing national databases, which includes details of parents, carers and GPs and information about the school a child attends. The next major milestone is for councils to start uploading local data, such as details of social workers.

Although it is early days, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) claims it already has "promising evidence" of how ContactPoint is helping professionals in their day-to-day work and that feedback on the system has been "positive" so far.

A spokeswoman says: "The lessons learned by early adopters are regularly being passed on to local authorities and national partners to help them develop and refine robust local implementation plans and processes."

In Cumbria, where 67 people have been trained to use the database, ContactPoint project manager Lorraine Drummond believes the system is making a difference.

"A lot of children visit Cumbria from other local authorities, and there is no way of knowing whether the family has had previous involvement with social workers," she explains. "As ContactPoint is enriched with local information, it will become a much more powerful tool because you will be able to see who else is working with that child."

Focus on training

The focus in Cumbria so far has been on training practitioners and feedback has been positive: 80 per cent said they would use it and more than 60 per cent found it easy to use.

In Manchester, where a total of 40 Connexions and health workers have been using the system since July, ContactPoint implementation manager Paul Remic agrees that it is "early days" for the database but says that, even with only small numbers of staff using it and minimal data, the benefits are apparent.

"Connexions have found it useful to know who a child's GP is and we have started working with the children missing education department, where for them any information about children who have gone off the radar is useful," he says.

Getting the database up and running has been a slow process, partly because it has taken time to iron out the details, such as making sure screens were hidden from view, but also because of hold-ups from the DCSF. "We could do things quicker but a lot of the time we need ministerial approval before we can move on things - that can be quite frustrating," explains Remic. "It can be quite difficult when you have told practitioners that it will be ready on such-and-such a date - and you just have to cross your fingers that the DCSF doesn't hold it up, otherwise people start to disengage and it is damaging to the reputation of ContactPoint."

Many of the delays have been due to security concerns, which some feel have not been resolved despite the DCSF pressing ahead with the launch of the system.

The promise that the system would be secure was further undermined in August when nine local authority staff from different councils were sacked for accessing the personal details of celebrities and friends on the government's National Identity Scheme database. There are fears that similar security breaches are inevitable with ContactPoint, given the number of people who will be able to access the data.

"A lot of effort has gone into trying to overcome the security problems, but it is quite simply impossible to keep a national multi-user system secure," says Terri Dowty, director of Action on Rights for Children and an outspoken critic of the system. "It's a question of when, not if, there are security breaches and no amount of audit trail can keep it safe."

Security concerns

Dowty has particular concerns about the issue of shielding data in cases where the details of vulnerable children, like those fleeing domestic violence, are protected to prevent them being identified. Some councils, she says, are working on the assumption that as long as someone is under the protection of the local authority they will be shielded, even though a lot of families escaping domestic violence aren't known to the authorities.

Rather than invest money in a national system, Dowty would prefer to see resources focus on child protection services. "ContactPoint emphasises a more general approach to children's welfare and this kind of low-level data about all children threatens to distract from the very small number of children who do need to be found," says Dowty. "We risk taking our eye off the ball and missing serious abuse cases."

In the face of these criticisms, the government has been at pains to stress that the voluntary sector is keen to see ContactPoint introduced. Barnardo's, which has been on board since the government first started talking about a national database, now has 200 staff in the North West with access to the system.

Pat Ellison, business change manager at the charity, says the adverse publicity surrounding ContactPoint has not been helpful.

"There's a myth that there is a lot of information on there - but there just isn't. It's simple information but it hasn't existed before in a reliable spot," she says. "Any device that enables practitioners to work together better has got to be a good thing and just knowing who the GP is and what school someone goes to will certainly make a difference."

But Ellison hesitates to sing ContactPoint's praises just yet, stressing that the true potential of the database won't be realised until more data is added and more people start to use the system.

Rather than regarding it simply as a database, she says it represents a much-needed change in the way practitioners work.

"The register itself is just the tip of the iceberg," she explains. "The bit underneath, the really important bit, is to get people thinking about what it means to share information. Practitioners will begin to be visible to one another in a way that they were not before. But it will take time and we've all got to work together."

The big question, though, is whether ContactPoint will be given this time or whether it will be consigned to history after a short life.

CONTACTPOINT - A BRIEF HISTORY

February 2000 - Eight-year-old Victoria Climbie dies after months of appalling treatment at the hands of a great aunt and her boyfriend

May 2001 - A public inquiry chaired by Lord Laming is launched to investigate Victoria's death

January 2003 - The inquiry recommends that the government investigates the feasibility of a database storing the basic details of all children for practitioners

November 2004 - The Children Act 2004 allows for the creation of a national information sharing index

December 2005 - The government announces plans to set up a national database for all children and young people

February 2007 - The Information Sharing Index is renamed ContactPoint

November 2007 - The government delays the database after HM Revenue & Customs loses computer discs containing the personal details of around 25 million people

August 2008 - The Department for Children, Schools and Families delays the introduction of ContactPoint, originally scheduled to go live in October

September 2008 - The Conservatives announce that they would scrap ContactPoint, replacing it with a smaller system targeting children deemed to be at risk

January 2009 - Management teams begin training at 17 early adopter councils, plus charities Barnardo's and Kids, in preparation for staff to start using the system

March 2009 - ContactPoint is deemed "almost certainly illegal" under human rights or data protection law in a report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust

March 2009 - The uploading of children's details to ContactPoint is suspended because of security problems

May 2009 - ContactPoint early adopters begin the training of around 800 practitioners to use the system

From summer 2009 - Training of management teams begins in other local authorities and national partners in preparation for wider deployment