National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) privacy notice

We keep this privacy notice under regular review and was last updated on 23 September 2026.

We respect your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will inform you as to how we look after your personal data and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

Who we are

We collect, use and are responsible for certain personal information about you. When we do so we are regulated under the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (‘UK GDPR’) and the Data Protection Act 2018. We are responsible as ‘controller’ of that personal information. Our Data Protection Officer is Benjamin Watts.

The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) is a nationally mandated public health programme. It provides the data for the child excess weight indicators in the Public Health Outcomes Framework and is part of the government's approach to tackling child obesity. The NCMP provides information to help build an understanding of national and local trends in child weight. It is important to have a good understanding of how children are growing, so that the best possible advice and support can be provided for them and their families.

The NCMP, also known as the School Height and Weight Checks, is a mandated annual programme delivered by local authorities, which involves measuring the height and weight of all school children in Reception and Year 6.

We commission Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) to deliver 0 to 19 School Nursing Services in order to weigh and measure children in school. For more information on how KCHFT process your personal data, read the Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) privacy notice.

The personal information we collect and use

Information collected by us

In order to manage the NCMP programme, KCHFT collects personal information about your child. We collect your child's:

• name
• date of birth
• postcode.

If you choose for your child to opt out of the NCMP, we will also collect your:

• name (as the parent or carer)
• email address.

We also collect ‘special category data’ (personal data which is more sensitive and is treated with extra care and protection). We collect your child's:

• height
• weight
• ethnic origin.

How we use your personal information

We use your personal information in the following ways:

• After the collection year has closed and initial NHSD validation has been completed, the enhanced NCMP dataset is made available for local authorities to download through the NCMP IT system. This dataset is provided as a CSV format text file containing all the record-level data that was originally input by users with the role of ‘collector’ at the local authority. Geographic fields based on child postcode, school postcode and derived fields such as height, weight and BMI scores and centiles are also contained in the dataset.
• The NCMP data is used within the local authority and NHS to help plan the provision of services and advice to support healthy weight and lifestyles in the area. The information is also submitted for national analysis and publication in a way that means individual children cannot be identified.
• To support the University College London (UCL) evaluation of the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP), helping to understand how the programme is working, its impact on children and families, and how it can be improved in the future. For more information on how UCL use your personal data, read the UCL General Research Participant privacy notice. If you provide your permission, we will use identifiable NCMP collected data together with data provided by University College London (UCL) to create a pseudonymised dataset for the purposes of evaluating the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP). We will retain the identifiable data and matching dataset for up to 3 months while the pseudonymisation process is undertaken. Once the pseudonymised dataset has been provided to UCL, we will securely delete both the identifiable data and the pseudonymised dataset from its systems. The information shared with UCL will not directly identify your child and will only be used for approved evaluation activities to help understand and improve the programme.

Reasons we can collect and use your personal information

When we collect and use your personal data, we rely on the following legal bases:

• Article 6(1)(c) - processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject.
• Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.

When we collect or share your special category personal data (such as health information) we rely upon the following legal bases:

• Article 9(2)(h) - processing is necessary for the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services.
• Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.

We rely on the ‘health or social care purposes’ and ‘research and statistical purposes’ conditions in the Data Protection Act 2018 to process your special category data.

We take the following appropriate safeguards in respect of your special category data when relying on the conditions above. We:

• have a retention schedule which explains how long data is retained
• maintain a record of our processing in our ‘Record of Processing Activities’ and record in it any reasons for deviating from the periods in our retention schedule.

How long your personal data will be kept

Who we share your personal information with

As a Local Authority, we may wish to conduct more detailed analysis of obesity prevalence at school level, this may be done in a number of ways. Data from more than one measurement year could be combined to increase the number of child records used in the calculation of prevalence figures. Alternatively, schools could be clustered geographically or according to shared characteristics such as deprivation.

De-personalised information from the NCMP is shared with NHS England and Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) to analyse trends, publish annual reports, and plan public health policies.

Aggregated unidentifiable data is shared with schools to enable them to understand the needs of the school population. They cannot identify individual children from this information.

Anonymised data may also be shared with other organisations, such as universities. This is to help improve health, care and services through research and planning. This information cannot be used to identify your child, and NHS England only ever shares information for research through formal assurance and approvals processes, seeking advice from experts as necessary.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have a number of rights which you can access free of charge which allow you to:

• know what we are doing with your information and why we are doing it
• ask to see what information we hold about you
• ask us to correct any mistakes in the information we hold about you
• object to direct marketing
• make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Depending on our reason for using your information you may also be entitled to:

• object to how we are using your information
• ask us to delete information we hold about you
• have your information transferred electronically to yourself or to another organisation
• object to decisions being made that significantly affect you
• stop us using your information in certain ways.

We will always seek to comply with your request. However, we may be required to hold or use your information to comply with legal duties. Your request may delay or prevent us delivering a service to you.

For further information about your rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, see the guidance from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individuals’ rights under the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation.

If you would like to exercise a right, contact the Information Resilience and Transparency Team at data.protection@kent.gov.uk.

Keeping your personal information secure

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal information from being accidentally lost, or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

Who to contact

Contact the Information Resilience and Transparency Team at data.protection@kent.gov.uk to exercise any of your rights, or if you have a complaint about why your information has been collected, how it has been used or how long we have kept it for.

You can contact our Data Protection Officer, Benjamin Watts, at dpo@kent.gov.uk.

UK GDPR also gives you right to lodge a complaint with Information Commissioner, who may be contacted via the Information Commissioner's website or call 03031 231113.

For further information read our privacy statement.