Dear Ms Persson,
Thank you for your request for information, and subsequent clarification of
your request, which was received on 23 August 2020.
Your request was:
1. Number of child records in CiN NPD dataset for each year. For the full CiN
dataset for 2019, number of children with and without a valid UPN.
2. Details of what datasets the CiN data has been linked to by the
department.
3. User access to the data:
a. Number of approved users outside of the department;
b. Details of which third party organisations users are, beyond DfE;
c. Details of accountability for the role assignments/security access to
users;
d. How many times the CiN data has been accessed within DfE;
e. Number of internal users with access to the CiN data;
f. Details on different levels of access rights, and whether these are
role based within DfE; and
g. Whether the same role based security arrangements will apply to
the expansion of the CiN data set out in RFC 1109: CiN census
2020 to 2021 assessment code set.
4. Which data items are collected by DfE but not included in the NPD
dataset.
I have answered your questions below. Please also find attached a dataset
containing the fields requested in questions 1 and 2.
1. The tab “1. CiN by academic year” in the attached Excel sheet gives the
number of child records that are held in the CiN NPD dataset for each
academic year, from 2008/9 to 2018/19. Data is held in several tables
within the database; the Excel sheet gives the name of each table and the
number of records held in each per academic year, along with the total
across all years.
Please note, the number of records in a table does not necessarily
correspond to the number of individual children. For example, the table
n_Census_CIN_Assessments will contain a record for each assessment
that took place, and we know that some local authorities return data on
more than one assessment per child per year. We also know that children
may have several different episodes of need, each of which will be
recorded as a separate record.
The full CiN dataset (i.e. the data collected from Local Authorities, before it
is matched into the NPD) for the 2018-19 collection contains the following
number of children with an episode of need at any point within the
reporting year, with and without a valid Unique Pupil Number (UPN):
Number of children:
2018/19
with a valid UPN
476,848
without a valid UPN
231,993
Total
708,841
2. The CiN data has been linked to the National Pupil Database (NPD) by the
department, and the NPD itself contains several other datasets. Within the
NPD, CiN data is matched to any other dataset which has Unique Pupil
Number (UPN) as an identifier.
These are as follows:
Dataset
Description
School Census Pupil Level
This has information on pupils attending
(includes Pupil Referral Units
maintained schools. From Spring 2013/14,
from 2013/14)
this includes local authority (LA)
maintained PRUs and alternative
provision (AP) academies, including AP
Free Schools.
Pupil Referral Unit Census
This has information on children attending
(incorporated into the School
local authority (LA) maintained PRUs and
Census from 2013/14)
alternative provision (AP) academies,
including AP Free Schools. From Spring
2013/14, this data is collected as part of
the School Census.
Alternative Provision Census
This has information on children in
Alternative Provision i.e. a school not
maintained by an LA but which the
authority is paying full tuition fees for.
Early Years Foundation Stage This has information on the statutory
Profile
assessment of children in the final year of
the Foundation Stage (Reception year).
Phonics
This has information on the Phonics
assessment of learners by the end year 1
of schooling.
Key Stage 1
This has information on the assessment of
learners by the end of year 2 of schooling.
Key Stage 2
This has information on the assessment of
learners by the end of year 6 of schooling.
Year 7 Tests
This has information on the assessment of
learners by the end of year 7 of schooling.
Key Stage 3
This has information on the assessment of
learners by the end of year 9 of schooling.
Key Stage 4
This has information on the assessment of
learners by the end of year 11 of
schooling.
Key Stage 5
This has information on the post-16
assessment of learners in school sixth
forms and FE colleges.
Children Looked After
This has information on children looked
after by local authorities in England.
Pupil Absence
This has information on pupil absences
derived from the termly School Census.
Exclusions up to 2004/05
This has information on pupil exclusions
as collected in the termly School Census.
Exclusions 2005/06 onwards
This has information on pupil exclusions
as collected in the termly School Census
(new format).
Post-16 Learning Aims
This has information on post-16 learning
aims as collected in the School Census.
National Client Caseload
This has information from the National
Information System
Client Caseload Information System on
employment destinations.
A UPN is automatically allocated to each child in maintained schools in
England and Wales. It is an identifier only for use in an educational context
during a child’s school career. Local authorities are required to return
UPNs as part of the CiN census.
A record from the CiN census is matched into the NPD if there is enough
identifiable or characteristic information (mainly UPN, but also gender and
date of birth) available in that record which either:
a) identifies the child as already being in the NPD via its appearance in
other data sources (which includes the school census and the early
years census and 6 previous CiN-NPD datasets) and from which the
existing pupil ID can then be attributed to the new record from the 2018
to 2019 CiN census, or
b) involves creating a new pupil ID for the child when the child's
characteristics cannot be accurately determined as currently existing in
the NPD.
Hence, even though a record from the CiN census has been matched into
the NPD (i.e., given a pupil ID), it does not necessarily mean that it can be
linked to other data in the NPD if there is no other information attributed to
that pupil ID from other data sources. This is particularly relevant for the
CiN census as a new child can appear, and therefore be matched into the
NPD for the first time, before they start school if enough characteristic
information is available in their CiN record to create a new pupil ID.
The tab ‘2. CIN-NPD Data items’ of the attached Excel file shows the CiN
data fields which are stored in each table of the NPD, along with the
associated identifiability risk level and sensitivity level. Please scroll to the
right for the key regarding these levels.
3. User access to the data:
a. The Department holds the information you have requested.
However, the information is not held in a centralised format, and the
Department estimates that the cost of complying with your request
would exceed the cost threshold applicable to central Government.
This is £600 and represents the estimated cost of one person
spending 3½ working days locating, retrieving and extracting the
information.
Under section 12 of the Act the Department is therefore not obliged
to comply with your request and will not be processing it further.
However, if you were to make a new request for a narrower
category of information or limit the scope of your request, the
Department may be able to comply with your request within the cost
limit, although I cannot guarantee that this will be the case.
Some possible ways of narrowing your request include specifying a
particular time period, or specific data shares that you are most
interested in.
b. Details on the external users of DfE data, including CiN and NPD
data, can be found in the department’s
external data share
releases. These documents contain detail of all NPD third-party
data requests and external organisation data shares. Shares that
involve CiN data are likely to contain the terms “CiN” or “children in
need”, though we cannot guarantee that all relevant shares will
contain those descriptive terms.
DfE have data sharing agreements with Ofsted and the Office of the
Children’s Commissioner (OCC), and details of the CiN data
provided under these agreements is included in the published
releases at the link above.
Requests for non-NPD CiN data still go through the Data Sharing
Approval Panel (DSAP) process.
c. The department has appointed Information Asset Owners (IAO) for
each of its information assets, one of which is the CiN dataset. The
key responsibilities of this role are provided below:
• Recording and removing assets from the register according to
the lifecycle of the asset;
• Management of asset-risk in line with department appetite;
• Escalating risk to asset outside of departmental risk appetite;
• Providing formal reporting on assets to the Senior IAO at least
annually;
• Knowing the physical location of the asset;
• Decisions on use, transfer, access controls for the asset;
• Recording incident management reports relating to the asset;
• Being aware of processing activities associated with the asset;
• Determining the value of the asset to the business (impact);
• Provides strategic direction for use and lifecycle of the asset;
• Ensures training in line with Senior IAO; and
• Notifying KIM team of replacement when moving from role.
The CiN IAO controls internal access to the dataset through
authorisation and management of the accounts with access to the
data, and these are kept to the minimum to enable the department
to collect, manage and appropriately use the data to carry out its
functions e.g. produce statistical releases and secondary analysis.
Also, the IAO is asked to give advice and approval for external data
shares before the request is considered by the Data Sharing
Approval Panel (DSAP).
d. Information on the number of times the databases holding CiN data
have been accessed is not held by the department.
e. CiN data is held on a number of databases within the department,
for the purposes of primary and secondary statistical analysis.
10 people have access to the dataset that contains the most
recently collected CiN data. This is restricted to the data collection
team and management chain, including the IAO, who are directly
involved in the data collection and statistical release and therefore
need this level of access to carry out their roles.
After the main statistical release, the CiN data is opened up more
widely, to colleagues who need to do secondary analysis and
require access for the purpose of carrying out their role effectively.
23 individuals have access to this dataset.
137 users have access to the CiN data that resides within the Pupil
Data Repository (PDR) database, the primary means of accessing
NPD data for internal DfE staff.
Access rights to the PDR and analytical databases are subject to
continuous audit and review, with users who no longer require
access being removed.
The figures above do not include those with access to the CiN
collection on the department’s COLLECT data collection system,
such as a small number of Data Collections Service Desk staff and
the technical development staff who prepare and administer the
collection. These individuals require access to the collection blade
to carry out their roles, but are not users of the data.
f. The IAO determines whether a user has read-only or read-write
access to the data. The response to question e. details the different
datasets that the user may have access to. Each of the datasets
contains the full non-NPD CIN data, so each user has access to all
of the data included in the data store. The access is role based, but
not grade-based, and is about the requirement to have access to
the data.
g. RFC 1109 and the change to the assessment code set is about the
introduction of child on child and adult on child codes for the
physical abuse and sexual abuse factors identified at the end of
assessment.
This data will be collected and stored in the same way as the other
assessment factors, and will be collected for the first time in the
2020 to 2021 data collection (to be collected by the department
between April and July 2021). This data will be available to internal
users through the datasets outlined in response to question 3.e..
4. Considering the most recent data collection included in the NPD, 2018 to
2019, data on assessments, factors identified at the end of assessment,
and Section 47 enquiries are collected by the department, but are not
included in the NPD version of the CIN data. The list of data items is
provided below:
AssessmentActualStartDate
AssessmentInternalReviewDate
AssessmentAuthorisationDate
AssessmentFactors
S47ActualStartDate
InitialCPCtarget
ICPCnotRequired
Further information on the data items collected is available in the
guidance documents that are provided for the data collection:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/children-in-need-census.
I have dealt with your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
The information supplied to you continues to be protected by copyright. You
are free to use it for your own purposes, including for private study and non-
commercial research, and for any other purpose authorised by an exception in
current copyright law. Documents (except photographs) can be also used in
the UK without requiring permission for the purposes of news reporting. Any
other re-use, for example commercial publication, would require the
permission of the copyright holder.
Most documents produced by a government department or agency will be
protected by Crown Copyright. Most Crown copyright information can be re-
used under the Open Government Licence
(http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/). For
information about the OGL and about re-using Crown Copyright information
please see The National Archives website -
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/uk-gov-
licensing-framework.htm.
Copyright in other documents may rest with a third party. For information
about obtaining permission from a third party see the Intellectual Property
Office’s website at
www.ipo.gov.uk.
If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please remember
to quote the reference number above in any future communications.
If you are unhappy with the way your request has been handled, you should
make a complaint to the Department by writing to me within two calendar
months of the date of this letter. Your complaint will be considered by an
independent review panel, who were not involved in the original consideration
of your request.
If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint to the Department,
you may then contact the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Lodge
Senior Statistical Analyst, Data Directorate, Department for Education
Tel: 07881 311620 - email:
xxxxx.xxxxx@xxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx