e-Profiles and security of personal information

The e-Profile strategy is a mechanism to promote young people’s involvement in recording achievement, celebrating success, reviewing and assessing learning, and planning for future engagement in learning. It brings together into one place assessment information and planning to improve learning, along with a profile of personal development needs that enables the young person to understand what they need to do to improve.

It is about young people creating their own individual record of progression in learning, their plans to improve, to describe the help that would be most useful in support of what they want to achieve and to celebrate those things that they do well.

It also provides the basis for collecting information to create an Individual learning plan, personal statement and information for a CV for transition at the end of Key Stage 4 and Post-16.

It builds on established practice arising from the National Record of Achievement and Progress File that currently forms the basis for this work in many schools. The e-Profile establishes an electronic document that is similar to the Progress File that addresses the DfES strategy to make effective use of ICT to support learning and develope-mature learners.

The e-Profile is a record of learning and progress belonging to the young person, with agreed access by those adults within a school who may be supporting them.

A schoolshould ensure that if the record is held on its school intranet system (for example, a learning platform), that all requirements for data security are being met in line with their published guidelines. This includes any passwords required by the young person to access their personal learning area on the school intranet/virtual learning environment.

In addition to supporting personal review, the e-Profile may also be used to help in the process of young people letting new teachers know all about them,although this is where sensitivities may lie.If it is agreed that a summary e-Profile is to be used to support transition between schools, the parents/carers and the young person should be aware of this, and the requirements for the transfer of information between schools to support transition are met.

A summary e-Profile is like a personal statement and these have been around for a long time and have formed part of the transfer of information at transition. The difference is that instead of the personal statement being on a piece of paper, which it could be as a hard copy of the summary e-Profile, it may also be saved to a CD, for example, to allow it to continue to be updated in the new school.

Things to consider

  • Copying an e-Profile onto the school system–Where are you going to copy this to? Into which part of your school system? If not networked, on which individual PCs will you store it?
  • Where should the PowerPoint and Word documents created be saved?–If the CD contentsare installed locally, the data may also be stored locally and therefore it may not be backed up. It is advisable to save data to a central data store that will be backed up as part of the school’s regular backup routine – just in case!
  • The name “e-Profile” –Infant and primary schools will need to ensure this is not confused with their FSP e-Profile. Only the FSP e-Profile data needs to be sent to the DfES.
  • Moving the e-Profile from one school to the next –There are a number of ways young people can take their e-Profile with them, but the following should be considered:

–general e-mail using the Internet is not secure. Within Hampshire, you could use Hampshire’s Outlook Web Link (OWL), which is secure within thecounty

–individual removable data device (eg: floppy disk, CD, USB key drive) could be used,but you may want to consider the cost implication. In addition, you would need to ensure that the receiving school was prepared to accept thedevice

–collective removable data device (eg: portable hard drive) could be used. This could be done either by someone in-house or by an external contractor (eg: EdICT) who would securely remove the data onto one device and then take it to the next school. However, this may be expensive

For further information/guidance on ways to transfer data, you could contact EdICT.

June 2007e-Profiles – e-Profiles and security of personal information 1