The PRIVATE Sector

Connexions – the total surveillance service for the new knowledge economy

Action for the Rights of Children in Education (ARCH) is a group working particularly on issues around surveillnce and children’s civil rights in the education system. They have been concerned for some time about the Depertment for Education and Skills (DfES) 'Connexions' scheme and in particular the use of databases to create an individual file for each 13-19-year-old. This is used to share information between various agencies such as social services, schools, careers service, probation, police, local authorities etc. The scheme is administered centrally by Capita (see news updates passim) and locally by a variety of organisations, sometimes local authorities, sometimes private bodies including a subsidiary of Vosper Thorneycroft, one of the UK’s largest arms manufacturers (their likely interest will be explained later) and ‘Young Enterprise’, an ‘educational charity’ whose directors and patrons represent companies such as HSBC, CadburySchweppes, Nestle, BaE Systems and Unilever.

Under the Connexions scheme, each young person has a 'personal advisor', or PA, who is at the hub of the wheel, and is responsible for eliciting personal information directly from the young person. Unless the young person refuses consent, this information is also 'shared'.

PAs training is for one evening per week for a year, and recently ARCH was sent (anonymously) a copy of some the training material, including the 'assessment tool' or 'APIR' they use on young people. The questions contained in it are astonishing. They delve into every single area of a young person's life - and also into the lives of their parents.

There is also a comprehensive 'emotional well-being' section that encourages PAs to ask about very serious mental health issues such as self-harm, suicidal thoughts and eating disorders. ARCH contacted Dr Judith Trowell, who is the Chair of Young Minds and also consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Child & Family unit, for her opinion, and she believes this entire section is dangerous and should be scrapped.

Moreover, the Connexions service believes that under-16s can routinely give 'informed consent' to the sharing and storage of all their data, so that parents may not even be aware that the information is being sought, let alone put on a database. But this is entirely wrong; 'informed consent' can only be used in specific circumstances, where the wishes of an under-16 and his/her parents are in conflict and there is a need to determine whose will should take precedence. Typically this occurs where the young person wishes to be advised about medical treatment, either without the knowledge, or against the wishes, of their parents. Placing large amounts of personal information not only about the young person themselves but about their parents and siblings on a widely accessible database, as Connexions does, hardly fits these criteria.

But why is all this a corporate issue? ARCH believes that the motive behind this vast collection of data is more sinister than just the government’s apparently overwhelming desire to know everything about everybody. Confidentiality guidelines for the Connexions database are unclear, if indeed they exist. It appears possible that companies may in future be able to access the database for information on prospective employees. Corporate involvement in education is an increasing concern, particularly in the light of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT – Europe’s leading business lobby group) interest in the topic; one of their leading members has called education ‘a service to the economy’ – a chilling image of education as training, turning out identikit recruits to be fed into the system of the new ‘knowledge economy’. Imagine the usefulness of a database that could warn them of a potential worker’s early anti-social predisposition and parents’ mental health problems. No wonder Vosper Thorneycroft et al. are interested.

ARCH have produced a comprehensive set of web pages on these issues at:
www.arch-ed.org/confp.htm
some of the companies involved: http://www.arch-ed.org/whowho.htm
informed consent: http://www.arch-ed.org/infcon.htm
the ‘knowledge economy’ http://www.arch-ed.org/knoec.htm
what young people are being asked about: http://www.arch-ed.org/apir.htm

Past Corporate Watch articles:

‘Corporations, Corporations, Education – Blair’s real priorities’ Newsletter 7, January 2002 http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/newsletter/issue7/education.htm

Article on ‘Connexions’ in The Private Sector 26/11/01
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/news/private_sector_Arch.html