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Pupil Information privacy notice

We keep this privacy notice under regular review and was last updated in July 2024.

This notice explains what personal data (information) we hold about you, how we collect, how we use and may share information about you. We are required to give you this information under data protection law.

Who we are

Kent County Council (KCC) collects, uses and is responsible for certain personal information about you. When we do so we are regulated under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). We are responsible as ‘controller’ of that personal information. Our Data Protection Officer is Benjamin Watts.

The Children, Young People and Education directorate comprises Early Help and Preventative Services, Children’s Social Work, and Education support services. We work in an integrated way with other children’s services teams in KCC and with partner organisations to ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for children, young people and families in Kent.

Personal information we collect and use

Information collected by us

In the course of providing education and children's services support services we collect the following personal information from you, when you provide it to us, or from your child’s school:

  • Personal information (such as name, unique pupil number, contact details, language, nationality, country of birth, and free school meal eligibility)
  • Special category characteristics:
    • Ethnicity
    • Special educational needs (SEN) information
    • Relevant medical information
  • Attendance information (such as sessions attended, number of absences and absence reasons)
  • Suspensions and exclusions information
  • National curriculum assessment results
  • Details of victims and perpetrators of bullying or racial incidents
  • Information relating to any part time timetables implemented
  • Notifications of off rolling or concerns around Children Missing Education
  • Information relating to post-16 destinations.

We also obtain personal information from other sources as follows:

  • Personal information, special category information, assessment results and SEN information from schools that you previously attended
  • Involvement with other KCC children’s services teams from our existing records (such as Early Help, Youth Justice, Children’s Social Work, SEND, Admissions)
  • School census and school attendance information from the Department for Education.

For certain statutory processes (for example, attendance interventions), we may need to collect information that school’s hold in relation to your child’s parent/guardian.

How we use your personal information

We use your personal information to:

  • enable integrated working with other teams and organisations to ensure you receive the right support at the right time
  • support you to access relevant support and advice services and groups
  • inform future service provision and the commissioning of services
  • undertake our statutory education duties (such as ensuring no children are missing education, and administering the schools admissions process)
  • support you to decide what to do after you leave school, including post-16 education and training provision, youth support services and careers advice and guidance
  • support or improve educational provision
  • improve the services we provide
  • safeguard children and young people
  • produce a holistic view of every child in a Kent school in order to provide informed support and advice
  • evaluate and quality assure the services we provide
  • analyse service provision and effectiveness
  • model patterns of service involvement to support future service delivery planning.

How long your personal information be kept

We will hold your personal information securely and retain it from the child /young person’s date of birth until they reach the age of 25, after which the information is made inaccessible to system users or securely destroyed.

Reasons we can collect and use your personal information

We collect and use your personal information to carry out tasks under to comply with our legal obligations, and to carry out tasks in the public interest.  We rely on the following legal bases under the UK GDPR:

  • Article (6)(1)(c) - Legal obligation: the processing is necessary to comply with the law (not including contractual obligations).
  • Article (6)(1)(e) - Public task: the processing is necessary to perform a task in the public interest or for official functions (task or function has a clear basis in law).

When we collect or share ‘special category’ personal data, we rely on the following legal bases under the UK GDPR:

  • Article 9(2)(g) - Reasons of substantial public interest
    We rely on the Equality of opportunity or treatment purpose condition from Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018 when relying on Article 9(2)(g) to process your special category data.
  • Article 9(2)(h) - Health or social care (if a case needs to be stepped up to children’s social work services, or the management of social care systems or services)
  • Article 9(2)(j) - Archiving, research and statistics (for scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes)
  • Article 9(2)(f) - Legal claims or judicial acts (for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims whenever courts are acting in their judicial capacity).

We collect and use pupil information under section 19, 537A and 507B of the Education Act 1996, section 83 of the Children Act 1989, The Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) Regulations 2013, and The Localism Act 2011.

Who we share your personal information with

We share your personal information with:

  • Kent County Council teams working to improve outcomes for children and young people
  • commissioned providers of local authority services (NEET support services, education services, e.g. The Education People)
  • schools or colleges that you attend after leaving your current school
  • local forums with schools and KCC representatives which support in-year fair access processes and support managed moves between schools
    local multi-agency forums which provide SEND advice, support and guidance (such as Local Inclusion Forum Team (LIFT))
  • partner organisations signed up to the Kent & Medway Information Sharing Agreement, where necessary, which may include police, school nurses, doctors and mental health workers and Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust
  • external moderators (teachers with recent relevant experience) of end of key stage assessments, to meet statutory requirements from the Standards & Testing Agency (STA)
  • the Department for Education (DfE) (statutory pupil level data collections for school funding and educational attainment policy and monitoring, and to inform the National Pupil Database (NPD))
  • other Government Departments including Department of Work and Pensions, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
  • Ofsted (in the event of a local authority inspection of children’s services)
  • Holidays, activities and food programme (HAF) (a government funded programme to support children from low income families).

We will share personal information with law enforcement or other authorities if required by applicable law.

The Children and Young People (CYP) Integrated Data Set

The CYP Integrated Data Set is owned and managed by KCC and contains personal data and special category information about children attending KCC schools, and matches additional personal data from multiple data sources within KCC to the pupils.

The aim of the dataset is to allow statistical analysis and research to:

  • support and inform Council transformation by ensuring the holistic characteristics and needs of the child population are fully understood
  • provide appropriate levels of insight, evidence and evaluation in order to embed knowledge and understanding of children and young people’s needs and issues into service programmes and projects, including the commissioning of new services
  • inform future service delivery planning and integrated working in order to improve outcomes for children and young people

KCC has robust processes in place to ensure the confidentiality of our data is maintained and there are stringent controls in place regarding access and use of the data. The child-level dataset is not shared outside of KCC. All personal data is stored in secured electronic files with restricted access. Only pseudonymised data is used for analysis. Outputs and analysis take the form of aggregated data, and are for the purpose of KCC teams and partners working to improve outcomes for children and young people.

The National Pupil Database

The NPD is owned and managed by the DfE and contains information about pupils in schools in England. It provides invaluable evidence on educational performance to inform independent research, as well as studies commissioned by the DfE. It is held in electronic format for statistical purposes. This information is securely collected from a range of sources including schools, local authorities and awarding bodies.

Schools are required by law to provide information about pupils to the DfE as part of statutory data collections such as the school census and early years’ census. Some of this information is then stored in the NPD. The law that allows this is the Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) Regulations 2013.

The DfE may share information about our pupils from the NPD with third parties who promote the education or well-being of children in England by:

  • conducting research or analysis
  • producing statistics
  • providing information, advice or guidance

The DfE has robust processes in place to ensure the confidentiality of our data is maintained and there are stringent controls in place regarding access and use of the data. Decisions on whether DfE releases data to third parties are subject to a strict approval process and based on a detailed assessment of:

  • who is requesting the data
  • the purpose for which it is required
  • the level and sensitivity of data requested: and
  • the arrangements in place to store and handle the data

To be granted access to pupil information, organisations must comply with strict terms and conditions covering the confidentiality and handling of the data, security arrangements and retention and use of the data.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have rights which you can exercise 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 (Subject Access Request)
  • 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
  • withdraw consent at any time (if applicable)

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

  • 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
  • object to how we are using your information
  • 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. Please note: 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 UK GDPR.

If you would like to exercise a right, please 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

Please 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, or write to: Data Protection Officer, Sessions House, Maidstone, Kent ME14 1XQ.

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.

Read our corporate privacy statement.