Tell the Minister for Education: NO to POD

Dear Minister O’Sullivan:

I write to you regarding the Department of Education’s planned rollout of the new Primary Online Database (POD). I call on you to withdraw this system until the legitimate issues raised by parents and the wider public can be addressed:

• It is unacceptable for your Department to gather sensitive, private data on every individual primary school child, including their racial profile, psychological assessments, special needs, religion, and PPS number, and store it until they are at least 30 years of age;
• It is deeply worrying that school staff will be able to enter comments on any child into a system so poorly secured that the Department cannot guarantee who will be able to access them;
• It is unrealistic to expect school staff to transfer this highly sensitive data to the Department of Education using a 17-step process so complex its been called ‘damn near unusable’;
• When parents decline to have their children’s information unlawfully transferred to the POD database, it is outrageous to tell teachers to just go ahead and enter it anyway;
• It is education extortion to threaten to remove funding and teacher allocations for children whose parents have made the decision not to enter their children’s details.

The Department may not simply ignore citizen’s data protection rights and legal protections, even when those citizens are children. Please scrap this POD scheme in the best interests of every school child in Ireland.