Unfortunately, child predators are likely to get themselves into as strong a position of trust as possible - coaches, church leaders etc, so I would expect them to attempt to become a safeguarding lead. They could then also use the data to explain why they were taking certain kids into one-on-one sessions.
I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here!
Senior leaders at schools don't need "data" to justify talking one on one to students or to figure out which students seem vulnerable.
On the other hand, data is useful for people with actual welfare concerns about a child in establishing if there might be some underlying reason behind the child's weird behaviour or expressed fear of going home or visible bruising that's "just an accident". Ensuring nobody can share threats data is a massive net boon to people that harm kids.
> I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here!
I very much enjoyed my time at an ordinary human child school and attended the mandatory educational lessons very promptly.
There's a balance between using data to identify problems and collecting data which is open to abuse. What concerns me is the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers who are typically not the most privacy focussed people. The predatory teacher example is an outlier, but it demonstrates how there can be unintended consequences. What's more likely is that there will be unconscious bias by the teachers against the disadvantaged children from poorer backgrounds.
To my mind, teachers should only function as a backup social service for those kids that slip through the net (admittedly, not a good net) and should be focussed primarily on education. What set my alarm bells ringing is the lack of openness about the database and whether families can correct false records (assuming they even know that the data exists).
But the "apparent indiscriminate use" is all in your head (I'm glad you have an ordinary human head ;), and if teachers were contacting the safeguarding lead to try to establish who has criminal parents that wouldn't exactly be an unconscious bias anyway! There's plenty of opportunity for actual unconscious bias every time they look at a child or the child opens their mouth...
The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website, the fact authorities keep records of stuff like absence from school and social worker contacts is universally known (most of the recent child victim scandals in the UK have been that various people noted of various possible signs of problems at various times but nobody had enough of a joined up view to actually act!) and the only bit teachers are going out of their way to not disclose is "I looked up Jonny's info because I'm not convinced that bruising is accidental".... for obvious reasons
> The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website
Well for at least some values of "secret":
> School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”
The article is short on details about how access is controlled to the database, so I am assuming (possibly making an ass out of u and ming) that it's poorly controlled. The lack of notification to the families is of concern although there's certainly scenarios where you specifically don't want them to be notified.
My biggest worry is further widening the gap between the rich and the poor and between different ethnic groups. Allowing teachers to have access to police data on the families could be very problematic.
If the children and their families are unaware of the database, then there's a lack of accountability. I also saw no mention of controls in the article, though if there's controls that the families know nothing about, then they would be somewhat moot.
There's no evidence that any teachers can see it. It says safeguarding leads, which don't even have to be teachers. What's left of what you're saying if we remove your assumptions?
