Four questions about a child’s assessment data, answered.
Who consents, whose account holds the report, who may read it, and what a school may see.
The four questions
Who consents, whose account holds the report, who may read it, and what a school may see.
Who consents when the person assessed is under eighteen?
A parent or legal guardian. For an assessment run by a school across a class, the school obtains that consent as part of its engagement and holds the record of it; we do not assess a student on the school’s word alone.
A minor cannot give the consent that holding psychological data about them requires. Where a school is the commissioning party, the consent still has to come from the parent — the school collects it, it does not replace it.
Whose account holds the report?
The parent’s or guardian’s account, whoever commissioned the assessment. Where a school has commissioned one across a class, its engagement record holds the engagement and the aggregate result; the individual report still sits against the parent who consented to it. Never the student’s own account while they are under eighteen.
The account holder is the person who can be held to the consent. That cannot be the child, and it cannot be an institution that did not give it.
Who may read the report?
The parent or guardian who consented. The professional who administered or interprets it. The student themselves, in the session, with the professional present. Nobody else without written permission.
A report read alone by a fifteen-year-old, without anyone to interpret the margin of error or the generic paragraphs, is the specific harm this rule exists to prevent.
May a school see an individual student’s result?
Aggregate results from an assessment it commissioned: yes, that is what it commissioned. An individual student’s psychological screening result: no, unless the parent has agreed in advance, in writing, for that named purpose.
A school has good reason to know how its cohort is doing. It does not thereby acquire a right to an individual child’s psychological screening result, and conflating the two is the most likely way this goes wrong.
What happens when the student turns eighteen?
To be settled: whether the report transfers to their own account, and whether they may then require its erasure.
This is a real question with a legal answer and we do not have it. Counsel must decide.
What happens if screening raises a concern about a student?
The referral pathway is followed. The parent is told. Who else is told, and in what circumstances a school must be told, is set out there.
A promise of referral with no route behind it is worse than no promise. See the referral pathway.
To counsel
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