In 2016 the British government passed legislation to expand the school census to include the country of birth, nationality, and first language of every child.
The Education (Pupil Information) (England) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2016 / 808 was laid before Parliament on 27 July 2016 and came into effect on 1 September 2016.
In two parliamentary written questions (42842 and 42942) in July 2016, Nick Gibb MP, Schools Minister denied that the new data would be shared with other Government departments.
Over 20 organisations signed a letter in September 2016, to Justine Greening, calling on the Secretary of State for Education to reverse the policy of using school census data for immigration enforcement purposes, and the collection of nationality and country of birth at national level, and to commit to protecting all children from stigma, xenophobia, and violence.
On 6 October 2016, a Freedom of Information request [15] revealed that Education officials already had an agreement in place since July 2015 to share the personal details of up to 1,500 school children a month with the Home Office, for a range of Border Force purposes under section 24 or 24A of the Immigration Act 1971, or section 35 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004.
The National Union of Teachers, called for this use of pupil data by the HO to end, emphasising that "schools are not part of policing immigration".
This agreement had been in place since July 2015, and before the census expansion was announced publicly in May 2016, and before the law was changed to permit nationality data collection effective from September 2016.
Corporate Watch note in the report of April 2017, that, "The memorandum states directly that it aims to: "create a hostile environment for those who seek to benefit from the abuse of immigration control."
"[21] In December it was revealed through the publication of information in Cabinet Office letters leaked to the BBC,[22] that it had decided in 2015 that nationality and country of birth would be collected from school children as a compromise, and that the then Education Secretary had to "fend off" more stringent Home Office plans to refuse school places of choice to migrant children, and to require passport data collection from every child in England.
In January 2017, the Department for Education first told schools by email, and then in updated guidance, that parents and pupils could retract the data by using 'refused' in the nationality field, while it continues to be collected termly.
[28] Monthly releases of national pupil data from the school census to the Home Office Border Force Removals Casework Team continue in 2017 as per an ongoing agreement.
In October 2017, the Department for Education confirmed in an interview with Sky News that, information obtained from the National Pupil Database was used to contact families to "regularise their stay or remove them".
[30] Campaigners continue to call for an end to the collection of nationality and country of birth data from pupils in the school census.
[31] and the human rights organisation, Liberty, is "interviewing parents and students affected so that we can challenge this toxic policy in the courts.
The Department for Education (DfE) publishes school-level attainment statistics for England as part of its online Performance Tables[33] alongside wider contextual information about the setting in which schools operate.
Access is granted through an applications process to the Department for Education internal Data Management Advisory Panel (DMAP), and is subject to requesters complying with terms and conditions imposed under contractual licence arrangements.
The sensitive and identifying items that require DMAP approval include name, date of birth, postcode, candidate numbers, Pupil Matching Reference (Non Anonymised), detailed types of disability, indicators of adoption from care, reasons for exclusions (theft, violence, alcohol etc.).
[37] A list of completed National Pupil Database Third Party Requests and those in the pipeline, are published on a quarterly retrospective basis.
Intra departmental transfers of data include to the Cabinet Office for preparation of Electoral Registration Transformation work in 2013, to match participant data the National Citizen Service, and for use in the Troubled Families programme,[38] as well as arms length bodies such as NHS Digital for a survey "What About Youth" mailed home to 300,000 15 year olds in 2014.
[41] There were 15 rejected applications between March 2012 and September 2016, including a request "by mistake" from the Ministry of Defence to target its messaging for recruitment marketing.
Campaigners from the children's privacy NGO defenddigitalme, have questioned whether this legal basis is met for some releases between 2012 and 2017 from the National Pupil Database.