Every School Child to be Assigned Identity Number

February 2010 The Education Minister, Julia Gillard, has announced a plan to assign every school child an identity number so that parents and teachers will be able to track their progress throughout their school life.

The identity number is being introduced to keep track of individual students results, year by year, and when they move between schools, for the duration of their school life. It will be used by the My School website to track school progress through individual student performance.

Addressing privacy concerns during a National Radio interview, Julia Gillard stated that there would be proper privacy protections, and that she is not interested in any individual child’s results.

"But what I am interested in is if we look now at this year of national testing, this will be the first year that we are re-testing students how have participated in earlier national tests so to make that more simple, we test grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. We first tested in 2008 so this is the first year that say a child in grade 3 is retested again."

"Now that gives us the ability to measure what’s happened in that child’s learning between grade 3 and grade 5 – how well has the school done in extending that child over two years of learning."

The Education Minister adds that " kids move school, they move school between the state system and Catholic system, they move interstate, they move suburbs, they might live in the same suburb but still change schools, so if we have a way of tracking then we can obviously have better measures of how schools are going in developing student performance."

She says that for parents and teachers, it would help them to track the records of a child’s schooling if they need to move school several times. "...children of defence force families for example routinely move at least once every two years and sometimes more frequently, so being able to seamlessly track how that child has gone throughout education when they get to a new school is vitally important."

From information provided by the Education Minister, 24 February, 2010.

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Every School Child to be Assigned Identity Number

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