Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government at what stage of development is the Department for Education Content Store; what information, if any, it contains about pupils; who has access to it; for what purposes; and how ongoing developments will be reported to Parliament or made public.

The Education Content Store programme is currently preparing for public beta phase. This phase will provide access, on a test basis, to publicly available materials which have been optimised for use with artificial intelligence. This will not include pupil work.

The Education Content Store contains no information about pupils. A limited amount of anonymised pupil work was included in the pilot, with written permission from parents.

During the pilot phase, a small number of British educational technology companies had access to the content store. Some of these were selected through the Contracts for Innovation competition with UK Research and Innovation, and others were participating in non-commercial user testing activities. The pilot phase has now ended, and only those working on the development of the store, or related programmes across government, including the National Data Library, currently have access.

We will publish a full report on the content store pilot phase before the end of the academic year.