The Children's Index and Common Assessment Framework

                                                                  - An Assault on Youth Privacy

                                                                                 
                                             

Identity surveillance on young people doesn't just start with ID cards at age
16. In fact, because of the Children Act of 2004 it starts from a couple of
weeks after a baby is conceived and lasts until your 19th Birthday, by which
time you will have been the proud recipient of an ID card and NIR file for 3
years.  The Government's motive behind the Children Act was that such
surveillance was in the interests of protecting children. However, child
protection experts are not as enthusiastic.

Protecting young people from harm is one thing, but penalising them and their
parents if they fail to be co-operative, compliant and high-achieving is another
thing entirely.  The same as with ID cards, fear is used to justify heavy-handed
over-surveillance.

Some features of the 2004 Children Act include: 

 

Every Child Matters Outcomes  (The 5 Outcomes) -

o        Staying safe,
o        Being healthy,
o        Achieving economic wellbeing
o        Enjoying and achieving
o        Making a positive contribution.

All agencies working with children or young people must work toward these
outcomes, and decide whether they are achieving them.

The Children's Index (CI)

A massive database is set to hold information of every baby, child and young
person. It's very similar to the national Identity register, but the information
it holds is much more detailed.

The Index will hold, or point to, information from the CAF (below), and can be
accessed by services with a 'legitimate reason' for seeing it.

Your personal details can be accessed by teachers, youth workers, police,
doctors, or a range of other 'professionals' in your community.

Being included on this database is not up to you.

The Common Assessment Framework (CAF)

Every unborn baby, baby, child and young person will be constantly assessed, to
see whether they are achieving the '5 Outcomes'.

All children and young people will be 'pre-assessed' (an assessment to see if
the young person needs to be assessed).

During pre-assessment, professionals decide whether you've been affected by
poverty, whether you're making a positive impact on others, what your physical
development is like, and lots more.

If this person thinks you are not achieving the 5 outcomes, or that there is
a chance that you won't achieve the 5 outcomes, they will undertake a 'Common
Assessment'.

This is a whole new level of information and recording.

It comments on;

·               Your relationship with your family
·               Whether you make 'positive' decisions about sex
·               What your parents spend their money on
·               Whether any of your family have had depression or other illnesses
·               Who your friends are and whether they're the type to get into trouble
·               How your parents discipline you
·               What the inside of your house is like
·               Whether you've been in trouble or have an 'offhand' attitude
·               And much, much more.

Of course, the answers to those questions depend on the opinions and prejudices of the person assessing you.

No confidentiality

The Children Act 2004 ensures that you can no longer confide in a teacher,
doctor, or worker with any confidence. You do not have any control over who gets
to see your information, or the opinions that professionals have recorded about
you.The information sharing on young people is supposed to provide a way of
predicting who is likely to be anti-social or criminal, based on things like
family income, school attendance, whether one of your parents has experienced
depression, and what assessors think of your attitude. The idea is that it will
be possible to 'intervene' early, but in reality this is just another way of
criminalising young people who haven't done anything wrong.

With all that information about you just sitting there on your 16th birthday,
it's hard to imagine that the government will not want to link your Children's
Index record with your NIR record. In fact, the Citizen Information Project has
already recommended that this will help to cut the costs of both schemes.

This would mean that the mistakes you made as a kid - or the mistakes that your
parents made- would follow you throughout your life.

Spending too much time with the 'wrong' people, or having a 'poor' attitude, or
even starting off on the wrong foot with a new teacher, will be used to judge
you for the rest of your life.