Children's Services - Privacy Notice

Dudley Council has a wide range of responsibilities to the children and young people within our area. We hold personal data about children and young people who are in our statutory care whether as Looked After Children, or are under a Child Protection Plan as are deemed at risk, and/or any unborn children with a pre-birth Protection Plan.
We also hold personal data because we provide a range of services to children and their families in order to safeguard and promote their welfare (e.g. a family are under stress and struggling to meet their children’s needs, or a child is seriously ill or disabled).

We collect a range of information including some or all of the following:

• your personal information (name, DOB, ethnicity, unique pupil number, address, telephone, email, NHS number)
• characteristics (such as ethnicity, language and free school meal eligibility)
• parents/carers personal information
• personal information about other members of your household
• personal information about close relatives
• details of family relationships in and outside of your household
• you and your family’s legal status
• your accommodation
• details about your physical and emotional well-being and parenting
• details of any risk issues
• youth offending information: offences (including alleged offences), criminal proceedings, convictions and sentences
• medical history
• health, social care or other services you are getting
• information about your situation given to us by your family/carers and/or other organisations (e.g. GP, school nurse, Police)
• reports relating to your situation (e.g. safeguarding and other assessments, Child Protection Plans and Looked After Children reviews)
• any documents sent to us relating to you
• educational progress and attainment information
• special educational needs (including the needs and ranking)
• school attendance, exclusions and behavioural information
• Records of phone conversations and/or meetings between you or your carers / representatives and Council staff.

The people who provide social care for you use your information and records to:

•  provide a good basis for all social care decisions made by you and your care and support professionals
•  allow you to work with those providing care and support
•  make sure your care and support is safe and effective
•  work effectively with those providing you with care and support

Others working in Social Care may also need to use records about you to:

•  check the quality of care and support
•  collect data regarding public health matters
•  collect financial information to calculate your accurate contribution for your care and support
•  ensure social care funding is being allocated appropriately
•  help investigate any concerns or complaints you may have about your care and support
•  teach care and support workers and help with research and planning
•  Ensure systems and processes used are accurate and fit for purpose

Most of the time, anonymised data is used for research and planning so that you cannot be identified in which case your confidential information isn’t needed.

You have a choice about whether you want your confidential information to be used in this way. If you are happy with this use of information you do not need to do anything. If you do choose to opt out your confidential information will still be used to support your individual care.

If you wish to opt out of your personal data being used for non-direct care purposes please contact us via matthew.smith@dudley.gov.uk

Children’s Services uses Power BI as a business intelligence analysis tool that can handle hundreds of thousands of lines of raw data and add value by categorising, calculating and visualising information to give insight.

Working with colleagues in Children’s Services, interactive business intelligence dashboards have been developed to provide analysis into things like, number of service users, number of children in need, different types of interventions applied etc.

These insights can be shared with those members of staff who need the analysis to help Children’s Services improve service operations. Access to personal identifiable level data is restricted to those who have a lawful basis to access it.

Your data is accessed by staff working for Dudley’s Children Social Care and Early Help Services. Children’s Social Care and Early Help includes a variety of different teams and which ones access your data will depend on what services are involved. The teams include: 

• The Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)
• Assessment
• Care Management
• Children in Care & Care Leavers
• Placements, Residential Homes & Contact Centres
• Emotional Heath & Wellbeing
• Corporate Parenting
• Adoption and Fostering
• Supervised Contact
• Virtual School
• Safeguarding & Review
• Integrated Youth Support
• Family Support
• Other Council teams so they can carry out their statutory roles and support our service (e.g. housing, education, Complaints, Business Intelligence, Corporate Finance, Legal Services, Quality Assurance)

We also routinely share your information with external partners and relevant external services including:

• Other local authorities e.g. in cases of adoption, special guardianship and fostering arrangements
• Government departments e.g. Department for Education, Department of Health
• GPs / NHS Trusts / NHS England / Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs)
• Police
• Benefit agencies
• Housing agencies
• Education providers (e.g. academies, maintained schools, pupil referral units, independent schools and independent specialist providers, FE and sixth-form colleges)
• Early years providers in the maintained, private, voluntary and independent sectors that are funded by Dudley Council
• Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)
• Youth Offending Services / Probation Services
• HM Courts & Tribunals Service
• Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass)
• Education, employment and training (NEET) Support Services
• Contracted services including those provided by voluntary organisations and community groups working with young people
• Commissioned social care and/or health services
• Your legal representative or another advocate (if you have instructed one)
• Children's Commissioner

Staff in each area will only access the personal information that is essential to carry out their work and statutory functions but may share data between the respective teams where this is necessary to provide you with services.

In 2020 the Children’s Commissioner collected Stability Index data, the annual measure of the stability experienced by children in care, from the Council. In future the Stability Index Statistics will be carried out by the Department of Education (DfE).

To support the DfE taking forward the Stability Index, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner is sharing the following with the DfE:

(1) All social worker episodes between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2019, for the cohort of children who were looked after by your local authority on 31 March 2019;
(2) All social worker episodes between 1 April 2018 and 31 March 2020, for the cohort of children who were looked after by your local authority on 31 March 2020.

The DfE will use this data to support driving improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of local public services for children and young people by supporting and strengthening local authority effectiveness.

See the Children’s Commissioner Privacy Notice 

See the DfE’s Personal Information Charter 

We are currently providing pseudonymised data to support the evaluation and monitoring of the work of Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDAC’s). The organisation involved with this research is NatCen. Further information regarding their work can be seen at NatCen About Us

Families engaged in this area of activity are provided with an Information letter, where they can object to their data being processed for this purpose, find out more about the study and how their data will be used.

All organisations we pass your information to will have an information-sharing agreement with us to ensure they meet the standards of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and will be covered by a legal basis allowing them to collect, use and share your personal information.

In some circumstances, information may be shared with third parties where there is a legal obligation to do so. If we are worried about your safety and believe we need to take action to protect you from being harmed, we will discuss our concerns with you and, if possible, obtain your permission to disclose this information. We may share this information if we assess the risk to you or others to be serious.

There may also be situations when the risk to you or others is so great that we believe we need to share your information without delay. If this is the case, we will make sure that we record what information we share and our reasons for doing so. We will also let you know what we have done and why if we think it is safe to do so.

Dudley MBC is working with a Local Government partner to develop a national model to support Councils in providing appropriate placements and support for children in the future. The Council will be supplying information from existing statutory datasets to support the project. There will be no identifiable information sent to the partner organisation. Key areas of data to be shared include but not limited to: -

•  Age
• Gender
•  Ethnicity
•  Status of situation
•  Support package
•  Disability

This is a time limited piece of work and to confirm any personal information will not be passed onto the partner organisation. Further information about the project is available at Data to Insight

We do not share information about our children or young people with anyone without consent unless the law and our policies allow us to do so. 

Education and training
We hold information about young people living in our area, including about their education and training history. This is to support the provision of their education up to the age of 20 (and beyond this age for those with a special educational need or disability).

Under parts 1 and 2 of the Education and Skills Act 2008, education institutions and other public bodies (including the Department for Education (DfE), police, probation and health services) may pass information to us to help us to support these provisions.

Youth support services - Pupils aged 13+
Once our pupils reach the age of 13, we also pass pupil information to the provider of youth support services as they have responsibilities in relation to the education or training of 13-19 year olds under section 507B of the Education Act 1996.

This enables them to provide services as follows:

• youth support services
• careers advisers
• post-16 education and training providers [Pupils aged 16+]

A parent or guardian can object to any information in addition to their child’s name, address and date of birth being passed to their local authority or provider of youth support services by informing us. This right is transferred to the child / pupil once they reach the age 16.

For more information about services for young people, please visit our local authority website.

Department for Education
The Department for Education (DfE) collects personal data from educational settings and local authorities via various statutory data collections. We are required to share information about our children and young people with the Department for Education (DfE) for the purpose of those data collections.

For example for school census:
section 3 of The Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) Regulations 2013.

All data is transferred securely and held by DfE under a combination of software and hardware controls which meet the current government security policy framework.

The legal bases for processing your personal information are:

• Compliance with a legal obligation (e.g. safeguarding and promoting the welfare of Dudley children including those children placed out of the authority, or if necessary to protect someone in an emergency, or if disclosure is required by the Police or other statutory bodies)
• Tasks carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority
• Contract for the supply of services
• Consent

For more information relating to why the Council processes personal information, please see the Council’s Corporate Privacy Notice available at this link: Corporate Privacy Statement

Whilst the majority of children and young person’s information provided to us is mandatory due to compliance with a legal obligation, some of it is provided to us on a voluntary basis. To comply with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, we will inform you whether you are required by law to provide certain information to us; if you do have a choice to provide information that is not mandatory, your explicit consent will be requested. You do have the right to withdraw your consent if this is applicable to processing your data. If this is the case, we will let you know.
The parent/carer is responsible for their child’s consent up to age 16. From age 16 onwards the young person can provide their own consent.

Personal data will not be retained for longer than necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected. There is usually a legal reason for keeping your personal information for a set period of time – this ranges from months for some records to decades for more sensitive records. If you require more information about our retention schedule please contact us at information.governance@dudley.gov.uk

Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, parents/carers and young people have the right to request access to information that we hold about them.

To make a request for your (or your child’s) personal information, contact the Council’s Corporate Information Governance Team;

Lewis Bourne, Data Protection Officer, at information.governance@dudley.gov.uk or by calling 0300 555 2345 and asking to speak to the Data Protection Officer.

Depending on the lawful basis, you may also have the right to:

• object to processing of personal data that is likely to cause, or is causing, damage or distress
  prevent processing for the purpose of direct marketing
• object to decisions being taken by automated means 
• in certain circumstances, have inaccurate personal data rectified, blocked, erased or destroyed; and
• a right to seek redress, either through the ICO, or through the courts

Withdrawal of consent and the right to lodge a complaint
Where we are processing your personal data with your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent. If you change your mind, or you are unhappy with our use of your personal data, please let us know by contacting Lewis Bourne, Data Protection Officer, at information.governance@dudley.gov.uk or by calling 0300 555 2345 and asking to speak to the Data Protection Officer.

The UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 give you a number of rights to control what personal information is used by us and how it is used by us. Information about your data rights is listed in the Council’s Corporate Privacy Notice on the Council’s website.

If you have any questions or concerns about the way we collect, store or use your personal information, please contact in the first instance information.governance@dudley.gov.uk.

For independent advice about data protection issues, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at www.ico.org.uk .

We reserve the right to amend this Privacy Notice at any time and will keep it under review. If we do make any changes, we will post the current version to our website at this address.