Baseline Analytica?

The more I see of the revelations emerging from the relationship between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and the political involvement on both sides of the Atlantic in this data omnishambles, the more concerned I become about the amount and types of data that are currently being harvested from children. As a nation that has signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, we are committed to doing all we can to ensure that our national policies comply with the articles of the Convention, including article 3: Adults have the responsibility to act in children's best interests and article 36: Children have the right to be protected from all types of exploitation. So, are we exercising these responsibilities with respect to our current data gathering activities with young people under eighteen?

The UK Information Commissioner’s office sets out the issues that must be considered before databasing information relating to children; for example that children cannot provide consent for their data to be taken or to be used, that there should be transparency about how the data collected is going to be used, that this should be made clear to the person with parental responsibility for the child, and that the parent should give formal consent to the data collection exercise. These conditions are familiar to researchers, as they are rooted in the principles first set out by the Nuremberg Code, devised by World War II allied nations in response to medical experiment atrocities enacted on concentration camp inmates.

When considered in this light, the English Department for Education’s current plans to undertake a mass data collection exercise with children in their first term at school via the means of an electronic tablet- based test descriptively labelled ‘Baseline’ is problematic from a wide variety of perspectives.

Firstly, there are no plans to provide clear information to parents about where and how the data is to be stored, how long it will be stored for and how precisely it is to be used, who will have access to it, or to obtain their formal consent for the harvesting of data from their child. Moreover, the DFE have already given two conflicting explanations to these questions. In Primary Assessment in England, published in September 2017 they state on p.15:

[Baseline Assessment’s] purpose will be to establish pupils’ prior attainment as the starting point for calculating progress measures when pupils reach the end of key stage 2. The new reception baseline will... be used seven years later to make the progress measure at the end of primary school. As now, this information will be published at school and local authority level on performance tables to inform parental choice.

However, in April 2018, they informed the TES:

The baseline assessment is not an accountability measure and won't be published. It is purely to assess children's starting point so that we can see how well schools help children to make progress during their time at primary school.

The DFE have not therefore provided a clear, logical rationale for running baseline testing. There are also additional major questions about this planned assessment initiative; for example it is obvious to developmental psychologists and neurobiologists that due to neuronal immaturity, it is impossible to reliably test children of the relevant age in the way that is proposed. There is also a 20% developmental difference between 4 and 5 year olds at the beginning of the school year, the same as between 8 and 10 years olds, however the DFE intend to ask all children the same questions in the same ways in the first half term of the reception year; this is poorly developmentally informed, and therefore highly illogical. And finally, turning to the prospect of teacher/ school/ head teacher accountability, this too is an illogical aim, because statistics indicate that the majority of primary schools do not retain the same head teacher during during the period that one cohort of children move through from R to Y6 and England’s problem with teacher retention has been a matter for public concern since the beginning of the 2010s. The number and level of inconsistencies in the rationale given for baseline testing does not therefore instil confidence.

Finally, baseline plans should be viewed in the context of plans to database information on primary school children at almost yearly intervals; baseline in reception, phonics in Y1, times tables in Y4 and formal end of key stage tests in Y2 and Y6. The inevitable result will be a huge pool of databased information extracted from the majority of children in the country (99% according to the National Education Union) before they even enter secondary school. One of the key problems of creating such a Pandora’s Box is succinctly voiced by David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, who  proposes that at worst, analyses derived from any big data set can be 'complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense'.  But this warning is unlikely to ameliorate temptations for future governments (whose political orientations we cannot predict) who come into the possession of such an extensive database on their population. Has this ever been considered, or discussed by Parliament? We have seen in the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica situation how sophisticated analytics can be powerfully applied to even a poor and incomplete data set when it has been collected from a very large sample.

The Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica scandal has been a wake-up call for many, for example the swift rise of the #DeleteFacebook campaign. But while we are mulling over our own data issues, we should not be sleepwalked by the current government into the collection and potentially permanent mass storage of children’s data on a national scale. The campaign Defend Digital Me comments that currently ‘parents have lost control of their child’s digital footprint forever, by the child’s fifth birthday, thanks to local and national, policy and practice’. England is currently the only nation in the world with such ambitious plans to database so much information on the youngest members of its population, children who have no ability to give informed consent to such an exercise, or opt out from the process. Their parents do however have such a choice. Further information on this point is available on the More Than a Score website.