By Andy McCue, 12 October 2006 17:30
NEWS
A £224m national database of all 11 million children in England, which is being set up in response to the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié, is to be designed by Capgemini.
The national Information Sharing Index is due to be ready by the end of 2008. The database, which will cost £41m per year to operate, will include addresses and telephone numbers for children and their parents - and will enable social services and doctors to share vital information about a child's health and education across local authorities.
The child database was recommended in a report by Lord Laming after Climbié was killed by her great-aunt despite having been examined by social workers, doctors and police.
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The Department for Education and Skills awarded the contract to Capgemini under a long-term agreement between the two organisations which began in 2002 and which is annually benchmarked for value.
A fully-costed design of the technical architecture is due to be completed by the end of this year.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Would this money be better spent getting the NHS national spine working in order that a few fields could be added replicating the IS Index fields - thus allowing professionals to exchange data between them in an effective and value for money way? Where is Sir Peter Gershon when you need him?
2. Sarah
Trust me (I know someone who runs a school office) there is no way this would work as most parents seem to find it difficult enough to keep the school up to date with their contact details.
So what chance is there that even if this was to get up and running, that the data would be worth the database that it was stored in!
3. anonymous
Lets see now...
Server 2,000
Oracle Lic 1,000
DBA for day 1,000
CapGemini profit 223,996,000
========
Total 224,000,000
That's how it works, is it?
4. anonymous
This always was yet another potentially disastrous & ill thought out scheme that is quite frankly scarey with the potential to go pear shaped.
Being well aware of the known propensity of the present government to make a complete mess of almost all the IT projects that it touches. In fact perhaps I should have written 'all the IT projects that it touches'.