Youth Access

Retaining young people’s right to confidentiality

26 November, 2007

11 July 2005

Barbara Rayment, Director of Youth Access, and Karen Stott of Off the Record, one of our members based in Croydon, met recently with the DfES team working on the development of the information sharing proposals of the Every Child Matters agenda. The current proposals include testing the feasibility of a national database of children and young people, alongside the development of various tools and processes to increase the sharing of information about children and young people using services. Karen is involved in information sharing meetings set up in her local authority area and is already confronting some of the professional cultural differences and expectations that this new agenda brings.

We were able to raise a number of matters with the DfES, including our concerns about how the agenda needed to be more age-sensitive and appropriate to young people’s needs; the dangers in creating a system which risks placing considerable power in the hands of practitioners and, in the case of the database, a risk that the focus will be on the maintenance of the system’s requirements, at the expense of active work directly with young people. These were many of the concerns we had already articulated in our response to the consultation that took place last winter.

Read full consultation response.

Unfortunately the DfES have had little engagement with the youth sector on these matters. Their main contact with voluntary sector representatives has been via the NSPCC and Barnados, which, as primarily children’s charities, are not exclusively focused on young people.

 We felt that the issues we raised were properly heard, though we will need to see how this might impact on the ‘guidance’ now likely to emerge at the end of July. This guidance will now be the subject of further consultation, which probably indicates a more cautious approach to this agenda than we had detected before.

We were pleased to hear that young people's right to ‘consent’ to information sharing, and with it the implication that they have a right to privacy, was being better recognised. We raised the need for better training and understanding of this concept, as the way different services and practitioners currently treat these matters is hugely variable. We also raised the problems associated with defining sensitive services, i.e. those services which will be able to maintain a tighter ring around access to information about their users and the importance of making sure that this was not left to be imposed upon services at local level.

As a result of this meeting, Youth Access has written an article, which we hope to have published in the youth press shortly. We will also be alerting members to the guidance consultation once it is published and would urge all to respond to it, since this will be the last chance for some time to shape the implementation of this whole agenda and with it young people’s rights to confidential services as we currently know them!

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