I thank everyone who spoke, particularly for making it absolutely clear that not one of us, including myself, is against edtech. We just want it to be fair and want the rules to be adequate.
I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for detailing what education data includes. It might feel as though it is just about someone’s exam results or something that might already be public but it can include things such as how often they go to see the nurse, what their parents’ immigration status is or whether they are late. There is a lot of information quite apart from this personalised education provision, to which the noble Baroness referred. In fact, we have a great deal of emerging evidence that it has no pedagogical background to it. There is also the question of huge investment right across the sector in things where we do not know what they are. I thank the noble Baroness for that.
As to the Minister’s response, I hope that he will forgive me for being disappointed. I am grateful to him for reminding us that the Secretary of State has that power under the DPA 2018. I would love for her
to use that power but, so far, it has not been forthcoming. The evidence we saw from the freedom of information request is that the scheme the department wanted to put in place has been totally retracted—and clearly for resource reasons rather than because it is not needed. I find it quite surprising that the Minister can suggest that it is all gung ho here in the UK but that Germany, Holland, France, et cetera are being hysterical in regard to this issue. Each one of them has found it to be egregious.
Finally, the AADC applies only to internet society services; there is an exception for education. Where they are joint controllers, they are outsourcing the problems to the schools, which have no level of expertise in this and just take default settings. It is not good enough, I am afraid. I feel bound to say this: I understand the needs of parliamentary business, which puts just a handful of us in this Room to discuss things out of sight, but, if the Government are not willing to protect children’s data at school, when they are in loco parentis to our children, I am really bewildered as to what this Bill is for. Education is widely understood to be a social good but we are downgrading the data protections for children and rejecting every single positive move that anybody has made in Committee. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment but I will bring this back on Report.