Liam Sloan of Newbury Today reports:
A [West Berkshire Council] blunder led to intimate details of vulnerable youngsters being posted to the wrong person.
Worlds End resident Alayne Summers was shocked to receive a torn, wrongly-addressed envelope containing 100 pages of highly-sensitive information about troubled pupils applying for places at West Berkshire schools.
The documents included names, ages, addresses and family details of children being monitored by the council’s social services departments, social workers’ reports about young people’s behaviour, including details of self harming, medical details of named children, information about children’s relationships with their siblings, parents and grandparents, school records, including details of previous exclusions, and confidential emails from council employees discussing named children.
West Berkshire Council has now said that it will no longer send such highly-confidential documents through regular mail services, but insisted that this is the only known case of such documents falling into the wrong hands.