
Mark Twain said there is no such thing as a new idea. The government proved that last month by putting forward proposals to improve the safeguarding of children in and out of education that hark back to the Labour governments of 20 years ago.
In response to the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié in 2000, Tony Blair’s administration introduced ContactPoint, a database to store the personal details of all children in England. Like many government IT projects, ContactPoint was beset by delays and spiralling costs and in 2010 was closed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition.
Two decades on, the government has included plans for a “consistent identifier” in its recently published Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Although there are few details, the bill says the consistent identifier will be a “number or code” that is unique to a child and that enables those responsible for the welfare of children to better join together relevant data and share information (Analysis, p8). The measure is being seen as a response to recent murders of children including 10-year-old Sara Sharif.
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