National Pupil Database

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The National Pupil Database (NPD) is a database controlled by the Department for Education in England, based on multiple data collections from individuals age 2-21 in state funded education and higher education. Data are matched using pupil names, dates of birth and other personal and school characteristics, including special educational needs, disability, and indicators for free school meals, a child in care, and families in the armed forces. Personal details are linked to pupils' attainment and exam results over a lifetime school attendance.

In October 2018 the database contained over 21 million individual named pupil records.^{[citation needed]} It is deemed by the Department to be “one of the richest education datasets in the world".^[1] This is just one of the distributed datasets that the Department for Education controls, and separate from the further Individualised Learner Record (ILR) in the Learning Records Service, for example.

Schools use Management Information Systems (MIS) to collect and analyse pupil level information at local level. Data from these systems are used to complete the termly school census returns provided to Local Authorities (regional) or directly to the Department for Education (national) three times a year. The National Pupil Database has expanded in its scope of the items collected, and from children of a wider age range over time. Data once stored in the National Pupil Database, are never deleted.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency passes students' personal confidential data collected from universities to the Department for Education, where it is linked to individuals' school records in the National Pupil Database, expanding the lifetime record for millions of people that the Department retains indefinitely.^{[citation needed]}