Student Profiles Go Online Down Under

Regular readers of the ReputationDefender Blog will remember this post about Indian Schools posting student records online for employers and universities to see. Now, a recent article from Australia’s venerable Courier Mail highlights another new policy by school officials to publicly post all student files for anyone to see:

The intranet database, dubbed OneSchool, will profile each of the state’s 480,000 public school students enrolled from Prep to Year 12.

Photographs, personal details, career aspirations, off-campus activities and student performance records are being collected from all 1251 state schools.

Some parents are understandably concerned about this initiative, questioning the rationale behind such a bold new program. They cite concerns about the availability of the information to inappropriate parties such as pedophiles and hackers. One reader commenting on the article suggested that personal information from the politicians who support the measure, along with that of their wives and children, be posted first as a test to determine if it safe before adding school children.

Using more of a stick than a carrot, Education Minister Rod Welford is quoted as saying that parents who refuse to supply information about their children for the database could find their children denied access to public education, and that the program, dubbed OneSchool is “non-negotiable.”

While the centralization of records and databases is a necessary thing in order to facilitate information sharing, it comes with a cost, and the child’s reputation moves online, as well as off. At what point does the availability of information outweigh the security risks inherent in making it more widely available?

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