Contact Point Database

P Foomer made this Freedom of Information request to Department for Children, Schools and Families

The request was successful.

From: P Foomer

27 May 2009

Dear Sir or Madam,

Please inform me of any exemptions for inclusion on the Contact
Point database.

If exemptions are permitted, please inform me of the reasons why a
child may be exempted from the database.

Yours faithfully,

P Foomer

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Department for Children, Schools and Families

18 June 2009

Dear Mr/Ms Foomer
Thank you for your email of 27 May about ContactPoint.

ContactPoint is a tool to help improve the wellbeing of all children, help
keep them safe and ensure that no child slips through the net of support
services. It provides a quick way for authorised practitioners in
different services to find out who else is working with the same child,
which will enable them to work together and provide faster, more
coordinated support to meet a child's needs. ContactPoint has been
developed in response to a key recommendation of Lord Laming's Inquiry
into the tragic death of Victoria Climbie.

It is important and appropriate to cover every child in England because
any child or young person could require the support of additional services
at any time. Therefore, the inclusion of all children and young people in
England is a legal requirement of ContactPoint and its purpose could never
be achieved through a consent-based or opt-out system. Furthermore,
including all children avoids the potential stigma that a targeted
directory could have.

Our over-riding goal is to improve the outcomes for children, young people
and families. ContactPoint is a vital part of delivering early
intervention and effective prevention, and is part of a much wider body of
reforms to improve children's services.
I hope you find this information helpful.
Yours sincerely

Paul Creeney
Public Communications Unit
[1]www.dcsf.gov.uk

Your correspondence has been allocated the reference number 2009/0047389.
To correspond by email with the Department for Children, Schools and
Families please contact [2][DCSF request email].

If you have any further queries why not browse our Popular Questions
website. This site has been built to allow you to quickly find the answer
to your question [3]http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/popularquestions

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P Foomer left an annotation (18 June 2009)

Confirmed no exemptions to any child in england, so we have to assume politicians and royal children will be included.

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David Hansen left an annotation (18 June 2009)

Supposedly the children of politicians and other "important" people will be "shielded". This supposedly means their details will not be able to be called up by any one of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of petty officials with access to the database.

Of course this is a government database, so the chances of the information not being leaked are zero.

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