Data Controller and purpose
The information you provide will be used by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ Learning Advisory Service to inform the services provided to families, children and young people, and the educational settings who support them.
The Learning Advisory Service is part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ Education Directorate: SEN Services. The Learning Advisory Service is the Data Controller.
Data we collect, process, hold and share may include (but are not limited to)
- Personal information and contacts (such as name, unique pupil number and address)
- Characteristics (such as ethnicity, language and free school meal eligibility)
- Special educational needs information (including the need, diagnosis, or professional involvement)
- Attendance information (such as number of absences, absence reasons, and any previous school attendance, or exclusions)
- Assessment and Attainment (as provided by the educational setting or professional, courses enrolled in, and any relevant results)
- Information from schools and partner agencies such as Statutory SEN Service, Educational Psychology, Health and Social Care regarding a child/young person’s special educational, social, emotional, mental, medical and health needs
- Safeguarding information (such as any professional involvement)
- Information from partners contained on an Early Help Assessment that will already have parental consent to be shared
- Information we record as a result of working directly with a child or young person e.g. observations, interviews and assessments
- Information from parents/carers and educational settings that provides a holistic picture of the child’s educational, health, social care and/or disability needs
Why we collect data and how we use this information
We use children and young people’s data to:
- enable us to carry out specific functions for which we are responsible
- support schools to include children with special educational needs and disabilities and enable their full access to education
- assess the quality of our services
- derive statistics to inform and improve our service delivery.
We process your data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). If you have any concerns the council’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted on DPO@towerhamlets.gov.uk.
Condition for processing personal data
It is necessary for us to process children and young people’s personal data under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) for compliance; with a legal obligation; with explicit consent; and as a task carried out in the public interest.
More personal data (such as health, personal and household circumstances) is processed under the provision of explicit consent; Health or Social Care; Archiving; Research and Statistics.
We need to comply with legal obligations including: the Education Act 2011; The Children Act 2004; The Education (Pupil Information) (England) Regulations 2005; School Information (England) Regulations and the Localism Act 2011.
A delay in you providing the information requested may result in a delay in providing appropriate services.
Storing data: How long do we keep your information?
We will only hold your information for as long as is required by law and to provide you with the necessary services. This is likely to be for 35 years from closure of file. For further details, you can view the Children’s Directorate Retention Schedule.
We may also anonymise some personal data you provide to us to ensure that you cannot be identified and use this for statistical analysis of data to allow the Council to effectively target and plan the provision of services.
Information sharing: Who do we share information with?
Your personal information may be shared with internal departments or with external partners and agencies involved in delivering services on our behalf. As stated, this may include:
- internal departments within the council
- other local authorities for the purpose of transition planning and tracking
- schools, early years providers, further education colleges, pupil referral units, academies, including non-maintained special schools where it is of specific relevance to the education of the child or young person
- the National Health Service, including the NHS Commissioning Board and the two-way sharing of information with NHS clinical staff
- clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), now called Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) from July 2022
- Other partner agencies that provide services on our behalf
- agencies with whom we have a duty to co-operate, such as police
Tower Hamlets Borough Council also has a duty under the Children’s Act 2004 to work with partners to provide and improve services to children and young people in the area.
The main reason we share data is to enable us to best support the children and young people we work with or to enable schools and settings to do so, as efficiently as possible.
We will not share any information about you outside the school without your consent unless we have a lawful basis for doing so.
In certain circumstances, we may need to share information with other organisations without your consent for statutory purposes. These can include, but are not limited to, where we believe there is risk of significant harm to a child, young person, or vulnerable adult, and for the purposes of crime prevention and national security.
The council has a duty to protect public funds and may use personal information and data-matching techniques to detect and prevent fraud, and ensure public money is targeted and spent in the most appropriate and cost-effective way. Information may be shared with internal services and external bodies like the Audit Commission, Department for Work and Pensions, other local authorities, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Police. This activity is carried out under social protection law.
We have a duty to improve the health of the population we serve. To help with this, we use data and information from a range of sources including hospitals to understand more about the nature and causes of disease and ill-health in the area. This data would normally be anonymised and never used to make decisions on a specific individual or family.
Your Rights
You can find out more about your rights on our Data Protection page.
Requesting access to your personal data
Under data protection legislation, parents and pupils have the right to request access to information about them that we hold, which must be responded to within 30 calendar days.
To make a request for your personal information, or be given access to your child’s educational record held by their education provider, contact the Council’s Data Protection Officer on DPO@towerhamlets.gov.uk.
You also have the right to:
- a change of any inaccurate data we hold about you or your child
- that we restrict our processing of you/your child’s data and/or restrict whom we share the data with, where permitted by law
- withdraw consent and remove data relating to you/your child, where permitted by law
- object to processing of personal data that is likely to cause, or is causing, damage or distress
- in certain circumstances, have inaccurate personal data rectified, blocked, erased or destroyed; and
- claim compensation for damages caused by a breach of the Data Protection regulations
If you have a concern about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, we request that you raise your concern with the Council’s Data Protection Officer on DPO@towerhamlets.gov.uk.
Last update
We may need to update this privacy notice periodically, so we recommend that you revisit this information from time to time. This version was last updated in 2022.
Further information and contact
For further information about this privacy notice, please contact the council’s Data Protection Officer at DPO@towerhamlets.gov.uk.