Serious privacy concerns over plans to give 5 million students an ID number

A plan to give five million primary and secondary school students an identification number is under fire, with one critic saying the move “should worry every Australian”.

Serious privacy concerns have been raised about a plan for five million students to be given an identification number, enabling schools across the country to share their grades and other personal data.

The rollout of a student number for primary and secondary pupils has come under fire from a bipartisan parliamentary committee over the lack of opt-out procedures and inadequate information about how personal data will be collected, stored and shared.

The plan is for every Australian student to have a number, known as a unique student identifier, which follows them from kindergarten through school and higher education and contains information such as NAPLAN results, enrolments and performance measures.

Unique student identifiers have already been given to all vocational and tertiary education students.

The plan will enable schools across the country to share students’ grades and other personal data.

Daniel Wild, deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, said the plan “should worry every Australian”.

“Like no other time in history, children today will face threats to their privacy through the collection of personal information from cradle to grave,” he said.

The school student number scheme was agreed to in December 2022 by all education ministers as part of the National School Reform Agreement, which has now stalled over a funding dispute.

Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll now said the “adoption of Unique School Identifiers without fair funding sets students and teachers up to fail”.

The state ministers have only agreed for the student numbers to be used for the tracking of interstate student school transfers only at this stage.

Further use of student numbers is subject to agreement by all education ministers and the federal government.

The ultimate goal is for the student number system to be used to monitor the progress of individual students over time through NAPLAN results and other assessments.

The school student number scheme was agreed to in December 2022 by all education ministers.

As Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said in the bill’s second reading speech, student progress and pathways could also be tracked, along with support and teaching interventions.

The bill also allows the disclosure of personal information about school-age children for “research purposes” but it’s not clear if individual data will be de-identified.

A report by a bipartisan federal parliamentary committee expresses a “range of scrutiny concerns about the privacy implications of this expansion of the scheme”.

The committee is chaired by WA Liberal Senator Dean Smith, who said there are “serious anomalies with the bill”.

“I understand why people may have suspicions about it,” he said.

Mr Clare said the need to have the agreement of all education ministers “is an important governance safeguard”.

“For the same reason, the bill includes robust privacy measures to ensure that any data collected is secure and used only for approved purposes,” he said.

Opposition federal education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said the scheme was “an important mechanism to understand each child’s progress and identify those who fall through the cracks”.

But she said it was “incumbent on the government to provide more information about how this scheme will work and ensure data will be protected”.

The federal government is now preparing a response to the issues raised by the parliamentary committee.