Privacy notices - Additional Support Needs

The Additional Support Service in Highland Council’s Care and Learning Directorate provides strategic direction and direct support to children and young people who have additional support needs (ASN).
It is very important to us that you fully understand why we need to process and store personal information for children and young people with additional support needs. In practice, this can be things such as their name, their address, the school they attend, the type of additional need they have and the level of support they require in school.
If a child or young person attends a school or nursery and has additional support needs, we must store their personal information in line with the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2009, which requires all local authorities in Scotland to ‘identify, make provision for, and review provision for the additional support needs of children and young people for whose education they are responsible’. 

 

We therefore store information for the following reasons:
a) to support children with ASN and monitor their progress
b) to provide them with appropriate support for their learning and pastoral care
c) to provide strategic direction, planning and training for staff who work directly with them
d) to ensure equity in the budget provided to meet ASN across Highland
e) to assess the quality of our services
f) to evaluate and improve our policies and practices for children and young people with ASN
g) to monitor compliance with ASN, Education and Equalities legislation

 

We collect personal information for the purposes of strategic planning and policy from the pupil database (SEEMIS) and also directly from staff in schools and nurseries.
We collect personal information for the purposes of providing direct support to children, young people and their families, from school staff, other partner agencies working with the family and the child/young person and parents/carers directly.

Information on children and young people who have ASN is essential for the Highland Council’s operational and strategic use. Whilst the majority of personal information provided to us is mandatory as it is in relation to enrolment in school, some of it requested on a voluntary basis. We will inform you at the point of collection, whether you are required to provide certain information to us or if you have a choice in this.

The information collected for the provision of direct work is given voluntary. Specialist ASN services will only work directly with a child or young person with the consent of the parents/carers, or the child/young person themselves. The exception to this would be where a child protection concern has been raised in relation to the child/young person. In such cases, it is lawful to share information with other services with the aim of keeping the child safe.

 

If you don't provide us with this information we will be unable to provide ASN support.

Our legal basis, under the Data Protection legislation, for processing this personal information is that we are supporting substantial public interest in doing so (Article 9(2)(g) of GDPR) and also as part of the management of the health and social care system (article 9(2)(h).  We deliver Additional Support Services in order to provide an important service to the public, and the use of personal information is a necessary part of us doing that.

We routinely share this information with:
• the Scottish Government, for the purposes of their annual report on pupils with additional support needs. This information is collated as an authority wide return however and does not name or identify any individual pupil.
• NHS at the point of transition to Adult Services for the small number of pupils for whom this is appropriate. Parents and the young person will always be aware that this information is being shared as it relates directly to support for the individual.
• Other services working as a partner to the child’s plan. Generally parents/carers and the young person will have given consent for this information to be shared with the partners to the plan.

Why we share this information
We do not share information about children and young people with ASN without consent, unless the law and our policies allow us to do so.

The Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 (as amended), requires Scottish Ministers to collect from each education authority, information on:
• the number of children and young persons for whose school education the authority are responsible having additional support needs,
• the principal factors giving rise to the additional support needs of those children and young persons,
• the types of support provided to those children and young persons, and
• the cost of providing that support.

The annual ASN return provided to the Scottish Government from Highland Council supports this legal requirement. 
In relation to sharing information with partners to the plan, including Adult Services, this information is generally shared with the consent of the parents/carers and/or the child/young person themselves. This data sharing is in compliance with the Highland Practice Model and the Children and Young Person’s (Scotland) Act (2016).
Where a child protection concern has been raised in relation to the child/young person, any practitioner within the ASN team is required to share information with other services with the aim of keeping the child safe, in line with the Highland Council Child Protection Guidance. In particular, information is required to be shared with the Care and Protection Social Workers and Police Scotland as appropriate.
 

Personal information on a child or young person with ASN will be stored in our systems for up to 5 years after they have left school. This information may be held as part of a spreadsheet, for strategic planning purposes, or within a case file, where direct intervention has been provided by a member of a specialist ASN service. This is for the purposes of monitoring post school destinations and to respond to any queries for information regarding ASN support and provisions as a pupil moves into adult services, employment and training.