Support Services for Families Privacy Notice

Birmingham Children’s Trust provides and commissions a range of support, care and protection services for children and their families. To provide these services, the Trust works with families to ensure that families receive coordinated help when it is most needed, and that this help and support is delivered using a whole family approach.

This Privacy Notice is designed to help you understand how we use personal information when delivering our statutory children's services, what information we collect from you, what we do with it and who it might be shared with.

Our core data protection obligations and commitments are set out in overarching Trust Privacy notice.

Why do we collect this information?

We need to process your data in order to ensure that the services we are provide are fit for purpose, efficient and effective whilst meeting our statutory and legal obligations. The information is being collected for the following purposes:

1. To assess the individual needs of children and their family members, to be able to plan and provide the most appropriate level of support.
2. To enable professionals in the Trust and partner organisations to share information safely and work together to safeguard children, which includes providing the right help at the right time to children and their families.  
3. To ensure children and their families are able to access services or groups, for support and advice.
4. To protect children who may be at risk of harm.  This also means processing relevant information and working with other organisations to ensure the support children receive helps safeguard children and families.
5. To assist the work of the courts by providing assessment and information when required.
6. To better plan and analyse the effectiveness of service to children and families and to help understand how services are accessed and used to support how we improve services and plan future provision.
7. From time to time we evaluate and assure the quality of services we provide which may also help improve our policies and procedures. This may include seeking the children and family’s feedback on the services they have received.

What services are covered by this privacy notice?

Children’s social care in Birmingham is provided by Birmingham Children’s Trust and comprises a range of services that offer specialist support to children, young people and families:

Our services may be provided face-to-face or virtually. We work in an integrated way between our children’s services teams in Birmingham Children’s Trust, and with partner organisations to ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for children, young people and families in Birmingham.

To view our Early Help Privacy Notice please view here.

What personal information we collect and use

• Personal information (such as name, address, contact details, date of birth, gender)
• Personal data (such as name, NHS number, date of birth, address, and telephone number)
• Special category personal data (such as gender, religion, ethnicity, disability, employment status, and some medical information)
• Special education needs and disability
• Personal information regarding family relationships and dependent children, school or nursery attended, additional needs including SEND and some medical conditions
• Personal information relating to your family's health, finances and lifestyle
• Details of any other agencies involved with the family including schools and information they hold such as school attendance, setting and exclusions

We may receive this information directly from you, or from a referral.

Legal reasons we can collect and use your personal information

We collect and use your personal information to carry out tasks to comply with our legal obligations, to carry out tasks in the public interest and in certain circumstances, with your consent. We rely on the following legal bases under 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)
• Article (6)(1)(a) - Consent: the individual has given clear consent to process their personal data for a specific purpose.

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

• Article 9(2)(f) - Legal claims or judicial acts
• Article 9(2)(g) - Reasons of substantial public interest. We rely on the ‘safeguarding of children and of individuals at risk’, and ‘equality of opportunity or treatment’ purposes 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
• Article 9(2)(j) - Archiving, research and statistics

How long your personal data will be kept

We keep personal information securely in line with the Trust Retention Schedule, after which time it is made inaccessible to system users or securely destroyed, unless we are required by legal reasons to retain records for longer than the stated retention period.

You can obtain the Trust Retention Schedule here.

Who we share your personal information with

The Trust will only share the minimum amount of information where it is necessary, lawful and fair with:

• Teams within Birmingham Children’s Trust such as those working to improve outcomes for children and young people
• Schools
• Local Authorities
• Housing
• Social Care
• Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)
• Family Centres
• NHS
• Police
• Adult Mental Health Services
• Substance Misuse Services
• Local Voluntary Services
• Local Children’s Safeguarding Partnerships, to help review practice and ensure agencies and statutory partners who provide services to children and families do so safely and meet their legal duties

No personal information is routinely sent or held outside the UK. Should the transfer of personal information outside of the UK become necessary, it will only take place if permitted by law, and then only where there are appropriate safeguards in place to protect the information.

Your rights

Under 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 Commissioners 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.

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 UKGDPR.

If you would like to exercise a right, please contact the Disclosure Team DisclosureTeam@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk

Your right to withdraw your consent

Where we rely on your consent to process your personal information, you can withdraw your consent to our use of your data at any time. You can do this by emailing DisclosureTeam@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.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.

Contact

Please contact the Disclosure Team at DisclosureTeam@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk to exercise any of your rights.

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, please contact CustomerRelations@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk

You can contact our Data Protection Officer, Subhasree De, at dpo@birminghamchildrenstrust.co.uk, or write to: Data Protection Officer, Birmingham Children’s Trust, 1 Avenue Road, Birmingham, B6 4DU

UK GDPR also gives you right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner who may be contacted on 03031 231113.