On 4 May 2016, after a delay, the Department for Education released new national guidance on the school census. From autumn 2016 the census is to include collection of new pupil data alongside that already collected and put into the National Pupil Database, which now holds the data of 20 million children and young people.
Some of the expansion does not appear particularly drastic: ethnicity and language data is now to be collected for all pupils rather than only those aged five and over; a unique property reference number (an identifier for every address) will now supplement the pupil's full address. In other areas more detail is requested: as well as language, returns must now include proficiency in English according to a five-tier scale. But, as well as general and long-standing questions about the use and sharing of children's data, it is the expansion of data collection to include country of birth and nationality that has caused most concern.
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