ScotGov selling children's data they said they'd keep private - sex survey

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvr65dpgzo

Fucking OUTRAGEOUS.

I saw this on the news - I hope that someone whose child’s responses have been sold by the Scottish government can report them to the Information Commissioner asap.

The children were assured that their responses would not be shared with anyone - but that was clearly not the case.

This is - or should be - an absolute scandal. Another one.

Given the outrage at the time about this survey you'd have thought someone in Government would have worked out this move could be controversial!
Clowns.

I am very angry about this. Scot Gov are an absolute disgrace.
Edited to add that I can see no worthwhile reason to be asking kids these god awful questions in the first place.

I saw this on the news absolutely disgraceful, I don't have kids at school anymore but remember reading about the controversial questionnaire and thinking my god that's too much and now this!

This just makes me even more glad that I didn't allow my nd dc to fill it in

I didn't know it was a parental consent survey, that's great you didn't allow it good for you. Was it all secondary years or seniors

S4 and above

I was trying to work out the worst case scenario. Children will be potentially identifiable by jigsaw means, and their deeply personal info may therefore be being sold to researchers?

Scotgov should be sued. Class action.l from parents in any LA affected (around half).

I still don't buy the justifications offered for needing to ask such graphic questions in the first place.
It was at the time and remains today deeply weird and off to me.

Agree entirely.

The questions themselves, and the way the survey was conducted, were irresponsible at very best, certainly potentially traumatising. At worst, deliberately abusive.

I am a researcher and this MUST be in the information parents get. It can't be hidden on a website.
It is really common to reuse data and it makes much better science. Open science is how reviews like the Cass Review and the recent paper by Hall et all. showing social transition has no benefits are carried out - by sharing anonymous data that people HAVE BEEN TOLD will be shared anonymously.

The problem is - as I understand it - is that the data is being broken down in multiple ways, by school. So for example if there was only one Afro-Caribbean family with kids at a small school in a rural area, they could potentially be identified and their answers to all the questions worked out.

Also, that parents were TOLD that this was for internal Scot Gov use ONLY and that it wouldn't be sold.

Fucking clowns, they couldn't run a raffle. And yes, they shouldn't have been asking S4s, or any school children, about their sexual activity.

When you have small data points you have to swap those or number them "less than 5”. This is how the census does it: 3 Chinese families in Lower Slaughter will be swapped with 4 families in a similar area so you can't see the income levels or religion of those 3 families. You can still compare income between Asian families across the South of England though.

My dc isn't gillikic competent so they need my permission for everything. I still can't believe that they had kids who are full time das students fill it in

Ah ok, I don't know what purpose it served and why they wanted school kids even over 16s personal information and then sell it.

I know there’s some serious issues here but asking S4 Boys to fill in a form detailing their sexual experiences just makes me think of The Inbetweeners, would imagine a lot of it is ‘embellished’ to say the least.

Yes there is always that, teenagers running riot on a survey about sex so there is the possibility of elaborate "data".

Yes, it's not clear even in best case scenario what value asking teenagers about sex will actually have.

In a classroom, where at least one child is statistically likely to have been a victim of CSA, it's so clumsy and careless.

https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/statistics-briefings/child-sexual-abuse

Same. Our council were one of the ones doing it. I saw the letter and immediately emailed the school to withdraw my children, who were at that time 13 and 15, s 2 and s4. The school were not happy and asked why. I told them I felt the questions esp for s4 (we had seen samples not the whole questionnaire) were entirely inappropriate, that I didn’t trust what would happen with the data, and that I only wished to provide the authorities with the data required for them to fulfil their duties to educate my children.

They were not happy and also made my eldest feel singled out when the rest of the class were completing the form. Which in turn he was not happy with me about.

What kind of fucking deviants want information about the sexual activities of schoolchildren anyway. Absolutely disgusting

I have just in the last hour had an email from school about a SHINE survey - Schools Health and Wellbeing Improvement Research Network. It appears to be Glasgow Uni ands focused on mental health rather than sexual health but the timing is appalling. Will definitely be investigating what is actually happening with this data before giving my consent - but as my "child" is almost 17 and in S5, he can override that I think.

This is exactly what some of my son’s classmates did in S4, I remember him telling me!

Ugh I fucking knew that they would do something like this!

They really cannot be trusted with anything.

I'm so relieved I refused permission for my DC to take part in it.

There's been a few issues wrt safeguarding that I've had to speak up about and had similar bad tempered responses from schools, only to eventually be proven right down the line.

Posting kids' pictures on social media, encouraging them to use tiktok, promoting LGBTYS, are a few that spring to mind. Others that would be outing, relating to child protection issues.

Education professionals should be ahead of parents when it comes to safeguarding, and it worries me that the situation seems to have been reversed somehow. The people who've had the training and are tasked with childrens' safety are sometimes actively undermining safeguarding.

Something in the culture of Education has gone awry.

It’s just like the NHS Fife case just now, The authorities seem to just guess what they WANT the law to say rather than acttss as my following if.