The School Census is a statutory data collection for all maintained (state-funded) schools in England. This includes nursery, primary, secondary, middle-deemed primary, middle-deemed secondary, local authority maintained special and non-maintained special schools, academies including free schools, studio schools and university technical colleges and city technology colleges. Service children's education schools also participate on a voluntary basis. Schools that are entirely privately funded are not included. It is a statutory obligation for schools to complete the census and schools must ask parents for information, tell parents and pupils where data are optional, and tell them what it will be used for before submitting it to Local Authorities or Department for Education. There is no obligation for parents or children to provide all of the data.
The census dataset contains approximately eight million records per year and includes variables on the pupil's personal data, including name, home postcode, gender, age, ethnicity, special educational needs, free school meals eligibility, as well as educational history and attainment results. The census also sends sensitive data to the Department for Education, such as absence, exclusions and their reasons, indicators of armed forces or linked to indicators of children in care. The data collected on children from age 2-19, three times a year, creates a "lifetime school record" of characteristics, testing and tracking, to form a single longitudinal record over time. This single central view of a child's personal confidential data and their educational achievement, behaviours and personal characteristics, is core to the National Pupil Database, a linked database controlled by the Department for Education.
The data collected for each individual pupil is listed in the National Pupil Database User Guide.
Data is retained indefinitely and in December 2015, the National Pupil Database contained 19,807,973 individual pupil records on a named basis.
It is "one of the richest education datasets in the world" according to the National Pupil Database (NPD) User Guide.
Controversy surrounds the school census expansion in 2016 to collect nationality data, first reported on in June, 2016, in Schools Week.
History and coverage
Prior to 2007, the Schools Census dataset was known as the Pupil Level Annual Schools Census (PLASC). Comprehensive PLASC data was first collected in 2002, including individual pupil names.
MPs in the House of Commons were assured on the changes to the "Central Pupil Database" in 2002 by then Minister of State for Education and Skills, Stephen Timms, that, "The Department has no interest in the identity of individual pupils as such, and will be using the database solely for statistical purposes, with only technical staff directly engaged in the data collation process having access to pupil names."
Frequency
The School Census is submitted by schools on a termly basis, in three collections each school year. The on-roll "school census day" dates and the submission deadlines are determined by the Department for Education. The first is the Autumn School Census in October, the main collection is Spring Census collected in January when the Early Years Census is also collected, and the final of the academic year is the Summer School Census collected in May. The separate Key Stage attainment datasets are updated yearly.
School census expansion 2016–17 and nationality data controversy
In 2016 the British government passed legislation to expand the school census to include the country of birth, nationality, and first language of every child.
On 31 October 2016, the House of Lords agreed after debate, with the regret motion on the expansion of the collection of pupil data: