Calculating risk

Some schools, medical staff and police are already pooling information about local children. But can protection be offered to the vulnerable without infringing civil liberties? John Carvel reports

Civil liberties groups think the government's plan to put details about England's 11 million children on an electronic register smacks of the Big Brother state. Social services chiefs believe it is an essential step to prevent victims of abuse or neglect falling through the child protection net.

As the politicians begin to get to grips with the issues, East Sussex has taken the lead by introducing the first online system, which went live in the Eastbourne area last month.

Its careful approach towards safeguarding civil liberties may have lessons for ministers as they push a children's bill through parliament to make all England's local authorities set up computerised systems for identification, referral and tracking (IRT).

The idea came from Lord Laming's report on the murder of Victoria Climbié, one of the worst child abuse cases in British history. He identified at least 12 occasions when staff responsible for child protection could have saved the eight-year-old from Ivory Coast from the months of hideous torture in a north London flat that led to her death four years ago.

Although Laming thought social workers, police and NHS staff should have spotted the problems individually, he concluded that they would have been more likely to have done so had they known there was a history of other episodes.

The Laming report recommended an IRT system that would give all the relevant agencies access to a pool of information about children, even if they changed addresses across local authority boundaries.

To avoid delay, the government decided against introducing a national system. Instead, the children's bill, now going through the Lords, will require authorities to set up local registers and swap information as necessary.

Ministers want every child to be recorded electronically, with a unique identification number and basic details about their lives. Margaret Hodge, the children's minister, wants professional staff to put a flag on the file whenever they are concerned about a child's safety, allowing agencies to call each other and discuss suspicions outside data protection controls. Controversially, she has said that the behaviour - including alcohol or drug use - of uncles and neighbours may be good reason for suspicion.

In East Sussex, they are well aware of the pitfalls of a flagging system, and their version of the electronic register tries to avoid them. The county is running one of 10 pilots, known as trailblazer schemes, that are being given considerable freedom by the government to experiment with different approaches.

Alison Jeffery, assistant director of children's services, says it got its register running first by keeping everything simple. After informing parents about what was afoot, it loaded basic details about 38,000 children in the Eastbourne area on to an electronic index. Every child under 18 in the catchment area of the Eastbourne Downs primary care trust was included, giving name, address, date of birth, gender and contact information for the GP, health visitor, school and school nurse.

Only 50 parents raised concerns and, of those, just three remain dissatisfied. Legal advisers said registering this factual "above-the-line" information on a universal register did not require parental consent.

But the index can also store "below-the-line" data that is entered when a service becomes involved with a particular child. This might be a medical matter with no suggestion that the child is at risk, or it could be an early indication of vulnerability. Jeffery says that none of this below-the-line information could be stored without parents' consent.

The East Sussex version of the register does not include flags of suspicion or risk assessments. It records every professional contact with the child and the course of action taken. It is left to the professionals to make their own judgments and get in touch with each other, as necessary.

Jeffery says: "It's people who help children, not electronic databases - they can't do the job for you. If you think another professional needs to know something, tell them. Don't leave it up to the system."

Lucy Ruddy, manager of the county's IRT project, says the electronic index is part of a set of tools for improving professional practice. Just as important is an information-sharing protocol that addresses massive confusion among professionals about what they can and can't do under the Data Protection Act.

The county has also introduced a checklist for identifying a thriving child, and a common language for the professions to describe different types of failure to thrive, so that for the first time they know what each other means.

The system has already improved communication and saved time and money, Ruddy says. Although it relies on people not machines, there is an electronic back-up, sending an alert to the project manager when five below-the-line actions are recorded and an overview may be appropriate.

Only staff trained in information sharing are allowed to use the system, which the county is developing with VisionWare, a firm specialising in integration software. There is tight security and staff cannot enter the system without responding correctly to questions about personal secrets. They are barred from prying into files that are none of their business.

The system will be extended to cover Hastings in the summer and the whole county before Christmas. Staff have been told they can pass on information from the screen to appropriate professionals in other authorities, as they could with a paper-based system.

Jeffery says the register records with an NHS GP children attending a state school, but there is no obligation on private schools to give pupils' names.

Children born in East Sussex will automatically be put on the register, but those moving in from outside, using private doctors and independent schools, might escape attention. An obligation on parents to say where they are educating their children would be useful, Jeffery says. "Our system is based on consent, so we don't see that there is a civil liberties issue here. We don't have flags of concern -we just include information about actions taken."

In the longer term, Jeffery would like to have a child-protection button on the system, allowing fuller access to the files in cases of genuine risk. "But this is the first stage, and we want to remain within the boundaries of public opinion," she says. "We don't want to create a storm."