Parental Acclamation
Posted by nicole on July 6th, 2009
I spent most of Friday at a meeting with the DCSF discussing some of the trickier elements of access to online services that they are grappling with. I came away most glad that I don’t work for a government department, but also appreciative of some of the problems that are facing to meet targets related to online access.
DCSF are required to provide online access to parents about their children by 2011 in a variety of ‘online reporting’ areas, including behaviour, attendance, attainment and performance. This smacks a little like one of the those goals that have not been thought through fully in terms of what parents actually want to see, and how they wished it to be delivered. For example, if the purpose of the online reporting is to show me that the school thinks my child has been in attendance for 80% of the year, whereas I think it is 100%, therefore offering me the chance to challenge official records that is all well and good. If the purpose of the online reporting is to tell me that my child is not in school - I’d rather have a phonecall please 
The meeting talked around three key areas - credentialing, interface and claims assertion, with the third area being the most problematic.
The question of credentialing for parents is being addressed by an interfederation agreement between the Government Gateway and the UK federation. Schools and local authorities are already establishing services within the UK federation, but should not have the additional burden of having to provide credentials to parents. Many people will already have a Government Gateway login, perhaps without realising it (have you ordered your car tax, or done your tax return online?) and it is a sensible and secure credential to use. The main concern in this area is that if this work does not move forward quickly enough, schools will be forced to supply local credentials. In the longterm, the Government Gateway and Direct.gov are looking at ways of integrating other credentials in to this system - such as OpenID.
Interface is an interesting question as of course a familiar look and feel across all of the services will be beneficial for parents, but many of these developments are currently happening on an individual school by school basis. Direct.gov is recognising the benefits of single branding across public sector services, and pulling in parental access to this makes sense. Becta is encouraging schools to at least aggregate and work at a local authority or regional broadband consortia level, but this will be a space where more work is needed.
The most problematic area is managing the policy around asserting your claim as parent to a child. Technically, this is a very simple process as claims-based access fits in well to the current architectures for the UK federation and Government Gateway. Managing the process whereby a claim is validated, a token for this claim applied, and most importantly claims revocated where appropriate is very complex. It is recognised that this is actually badly managed in the real world at the moment - the Local Authority where I wish to send my child to school accepts my school application without much identity validation or checking. This information is then sent on to the school, and I become the primary contact for that child. Therefore, my claim as parent is fundamentally self-asserted. It is assumed that a stronger validation is needed in the online environment, but this assumption needs further work to establish a process. This may need stronger identity validation at the school application point, or could be a weaker process where tokens are handed out to children via the ‘book bag’. Schools also recognise that they tend to default to creating a core relationship with the mother - a fact that is often not valid in today’s environment.
Overall, I think more work is needed on the services that parents will feel are beneficial for online access. I’d much rather see combined online access for the school application with payments for trips, consent forms for trips, payments for school meals, and all the other administrative functions of being a parent. Behaviour and reporting? Well there is a lot to say in this area for the old-fashioned school report and parents evening