Scottish pupils 'sex survey' data advertised

Of the LAs that did take part
Clackmannanshire,, Glasgow, Renfrewshire - SNP minority
Dundee - SNP majority
East Renfrewshire - SNP / Labour coalition
Falkirk - SNP / Independent coalition
Stirling - no overall control, SNP + Labour

I wonder how the SNP councillors there will feel about being thrown under a bus.

IMO the bigger the organisation and the harder it is to force personal ownership (sack) the more difficult it is to get staff worry about the bus.

People make decisions.
They make different choices when they will be personally impacted.

Authorising with no risk of self harm (pay fine, job loss, jail) on an "Unknown, unknown" is easy.
Its forcing the individual to take ownership at each level that is the problem.
"someone else" did the a risk assessment process that I rely on when I have know idea what was done is a culture.

🎯

anyone who criticises or asks questions is operating in bad faith, is therefore the enemy, and must be ignored/smeared/derided. This leads them to double down.

Like this, where a child is made to feel guilty/different and ends up being cross at the adult who was doing the right thing in relation to safeguarding:

My elder son was annoyed as the teachers were telling the kids it was to help the school and he felt singled out. He had a go at me when he came home.

That any child should feel that their own parent is in the wrong, when it's the school, the LA and the government who is failing them is awful. Safeguarding has been flipped over on its head, where suddenly the ones doing it are the "baddies".

I hope the LAs take note that if GDPR was found to have been broken, Jenny Gilruth will have no compunction about throwing them under the bus.

As with the BeeWell survey, it's going to come down to a privacy law expert who also understands scientific research methodology being able to prove that this survey did not meet the criteria for "public task" under GDPR. I'm neither of these things but I can't imagine it would. Irrespective of the inappropriate question content (which obviously also needs addressing), there are other, opt-in methods that could be used to do surveys.

I hope the LAs take note that if GDPR was found to have been broken, Jenny Gilruth will have no compunction about throwing them under the bus.

Urgghhh!

An awful lot of ‘we didn’t collected the data, LAs did so it is their fault’ followed by ‘it is a good thing that the government collects data so we will be pressurising the LAs that refused to do our bidding.’

An example of how the SNP works in microcosm:
Bad = LAs fault/Westminsters fault
Good = Isn’t the Scottish Government great?

And absolutely no recognition of the issue at hand.

This is brilliantly laid out.

Although it wasn't using candidate numbers, the BeeWell survey (linked upthread) in England has significant parallels:

Children have been given a survey that asks very intimate questions.

✅ Including questions which ask 12-15 year olds about sexual orientation and which conflate both this and the PC of sex with "gender identity" in the opening 3 questions. From this foundational positioning of gender identity as factually true, children are asked questions about their well-being.

No consent sought.

✅ Parents were contacted on an opt-out basis, meaning that if they didn't see the notification of the survey in school communications (or didn't fully understand what it entailed) their child was given the survey. Prior to this, their child's personal identifiable information had already been sent to BeeWell. Children were asked to consent to how their data was being used at the point at which they completed the survey, during the online sign-in process (surveys were completed online, using the platform provided by BeeWell). It is highly likely that most just ticked it without much thought because of how it was positioned e.g. schools had written to parents, it's valuable information to help with mental health of current and future generations of children etc etc.

No consideration of the impact on children, a proportion of whom will have been abused. Questions that children may well not want to share in a classroom setting, or have a teacher/teaching assistant see their responses to. No provision made for children who were upset or impacted by these questions.

Consideration and support was given.... but arguably this made it worse, because "support" was in fact a heavy push of the belief that we all have a gender identity. The online survey had hyperlinks to information from the Pride Trust and other information about gender identity, further embedding this belief as fact. Children are likely to trust this information because they are accessing it in school.

the survey combined some potentially 'outing' information with the sensitive information. So 'jigsaw' identification is potentially possible.

✅ The BeeWell survey is a blank cheque for potentially the rest of the child's life into adulthood. If parents didn't opt their child out, there is no cut off date of when the researchers will stop matching the data they have gathered to other personal information. The information in the opt-out form says that in future, BeeWell intends to map the data to future mental health, exam, salary and other records to build a picture of how each child fares during life and how this maps back to their mental health (and gender identity) as a teen.

Thirdly, the LA said the info wouldn't be shared. And now it's up for sale to researchers.

BeeWell states that the research which uses the information (which will include anonymised data) will be shared with schools and other organisations. It's possible that schools which participated will get this for free but obviously this sharing will also be monetised as that will be partly how the project is funded.

So all in all, two slightly different scenarios but with very much the same theme: something is positioned to parents and children as valuable to their and others' mental health (with implicit guilt about being selfish if not participating), when in fact it's actually a data mining exercise which may lead to harmful mental health (and potentially other detrimental) outcomes for the participants..

That is terrifying. I used to think Nicola Sturgeon seemed sensible- now I know all this, I think she & her henchpeople are all insane. Remember also when they gave a porn film national funding? What is going on?

I think in my younger son’s class there were more opt outs but in my elder son’s he was the only one in the class who was removed from the survey. I wonder if because he was older parents didn’t check school bags for letters the same way but I did as I had the younger child. My elder son was annoyed as the teachers were telling the kids it was to help the school and he felt singled out. He had a go at me when he came home.

it came around again in 2023 by which time I was only able to withdraw my younger child, as the elder one was 17.

Hoardasurass · Today 20:07

Well, that's good - I would have refused as well. What about the parents who missed it, or didn't understand the implications? It's a nasty piece of snakery indeed.

It's not only searchable but it's linked to their candidate number that's used for everything including your exam results.
Thankfully I'm another one of the parents who refused permission.

Anyone surprised?

And I do not trust a single word out of Jenny Gilruth's mouth.

It seems that not one teacher told a single child that it wasn't compulsory. The Government lied, when they had the teachers tell the children that their answers would not be shared; now they're for sale.

Compounding their errors, the data is searchable and individuals may be identifiable. There is then the possibility of the data being hacked, or mined by a bad employee.

I can't believe that people are trying to swat it away, as something minor. It's a huge scandal.

I also withdrew my children from the survey.

It gives me no pleasure to see that I was right to.

The Scottish government cannot be trusted.

we were in one of the areas that had this survey. I knew I was right to withdraw my children from it. They were 13 and 15 at the time.

Welcome to SNP Scotland where:

Over 16s are “adults”
Over 14s can be asked questions about intimate matters such as sex and substance use without informed parental consent including what happens to the data

the question remains why the Scottish government are interested in the sexual activity of children .

But men under 25 who commit crimes like raping and burning women alive get a lighter sentence because their brains aren’t fully developed or some such:

https://news.sky.com/story/jill-barclay-man-23-who-raped-mum-of-two-in-aberdeen-and-burned-her-alive-given-lesser-sentence-due-to-young-age-12888501

What the actual fuck is this shitshow of a country

"Data access requests by researchers in relation to the health and wellbeing census will be paused while we undertake our considerations.'

Paused.

So that what? They can quietly go back to releasing the data once the media and the public and the Scottish Parliament aren't looking any more?

Wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.

Thanks I missed that

Did we say at the time that this was going to be an issue and clarity was needed about what this was for?

The link doesn't say that the data has been taken down all it says is that they aren't collecting anymore data right now.