Schoolkids’ new identity numbers to be linked to My School program

GIVING every school child in Australia an identity number will allow a seamless tracking of their academic progress, federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said.

The “student identifier” will be annexed to the My School program which publishes the performance of individual schools on the internet.

“If we have a way of tracking, then we can, obviously, have better measures of how schools are going,” Ms Gillard told ABC Radio today.

The number would allow the literacy and numeracy performance of individual students to be monitored during their school life, especially as they moved from school to school.

“Being able to seamlessly track a child throughout education when they get to a new school is vitally important,” Ms Gillard said.

The identity of students would be covered by “proper privacy protections” but access would be given to parents and teachers.

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Ms Gillard will provide more details of the new program when she addresses the National Press Club later today.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said he was concerned about any proposal that appeared to commodify children.

“Children should have names not numbers,” he said.

“People have names and I think that it ought to be possible to identify people’s performance based on their names, based on who they are.”

The public was always rightly suspicious of governments attempting to introduce some kind of identification card by the back door, Mr Abbott said.

Labor backbencher Sharon Bird said students in their final two years of school already had an identity number.

“It allows parents to have that information and follow it through and not have a shoe box where you have kept all the paper copies of their reports,” she said.

“It is just a sensible reform I think that parents and schools will very much welcome.”

Source: The Australian