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2. CONNEXIONS The Connexions service, created in 2000, offers a complete careers, counselling and advice service to 13-19-year-olds. The Learning and Skills Act 2000 provided for information to be collected and shared without consent across a wide range of health, education, social care and youth justice agencies in order to identify young people in the target age group, and to spot those who are ‘disengaged’ from education or showing signs of having personal problems that might present a ‘barrier to learning’. Each local Connexions service aims to collect information about everyone aged 13-19 in their area, which is held on the Connexions Customer Information System (CCIS). Consent is normally sought before information is stored or shared with other agencies, but the consent is a ‘one-off’ to grant all agencies access to the electronic record until such future time as consent is withdrawn. In other words: the consent is not limited to a specific time, place or piece of information and the young person cannot refine the consent to specify which of the agencies listed above may or may not have access to specific information. The Connexions service believes that any young person in the target age-group (ie 13 or over) can consent to information-sharing in their own right, without the knowledge or involvement of parents, so long as the PA believes them to be ‘competent’. Every young person is allocated a ‘personal adviser’ (PA) who brokers access to services, and is responsible for carrying out an in-depth personal assessment of the young person. This assessment process, known as APIR (Assessment, Planning, Implementation and Review), covers every area of the young person’s life, including information about parents, family and friends. Using APIR, the PA can obtain information from the young person in order to construct a personal assessment. If the one-off consent has been given, the PA will decide which parts of this assessment should be shared with other agencies. Information is held on the CCIS until a young person reaches 20 (25 if they have special educational needs) and is then archived for a further 3 years. |
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