Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND) privacy statement

Part of: Privacy statements

The Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND) Service comprises the following teams:

  • Education Psychology
  • Statutory Assessment
  • SEND Improvement (which incorporates the Haringey Home-School Transport team)
  • Educational Inclusion

We work in an integrated way with other children’s services teams in the council and with partner organisations to ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for children, young people and families in Haringey. 

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 or educational setting:

  • personal information (such as name, unique pupil number, contact details, language, nationality, country of birth, and free school meal eligibility)
  • special category characteristics:
    • ethnicity
    • SEND information
    • relevant medical information
  • attendance information (such as sessions attended, number of absences and absence reasons)
  • exclusions information (fixed term and permanent)
  • national curriculum assessment results
  • developmental check outcomes
  • school or setting attended
  • any other council services supporting children (for example, Children’s or Adults Social Care Services)

Information collected from other sources

We also obtain personal information from other sources as follows:

  • personal information, special category information, assessment results and SEN information from schools or settings that your child previously attended
  • involvement with other council children’s services teams from our existing records (such as Early Help, Youth Justice, Children’s Social Work, Admissions)
  • involvement with NHS services (such as health visitors, school nurses, therapists or children’s mental health services)

How we use your personal information

We use your personal information to:

  • enable integrated working with other teams and organisations to ensure your child receives the right support at the right time
  • support you to access relevant support and advice services and groups
  • provide schools with additional funding to enable them to meet children’s needs
  • 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)
  • make provisions regarding Home to School travel assistance
  • 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 children with SEND 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 we keep your personal information

SEND services 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.

School transport for special needs pupils: 6 years.

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
  • 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).

We collect and use pupil information under:

  • section 537A and 507B of the Education Act 1996
  • section 83 of the Children Act 1989
  • The Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) Regulations 2013
  • The Localism Act 2011

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)(f) - Legal claims or judicial acts (for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims whenever courts are acting in their judicial capacity).

Who we share your personal information with

We share your personal information with:

  • other Council teams working to improve outcomes for children and young people
  • commissioned providers of local authority services (NEET support services, education services, Early Help services, Haringey Learning Partnership, Virtual school,)
  • early years settings, schools or colleges that you attend including those you attend after leaving your current educational setting
  • local forums with schools and Council representatives which support in-year fair access processes and support managed moves between schools
  • partner organisations signed up to the Haringey Information Sharing Agreement, where necessary, which may include police, Health NHS Foundation Trust Professionals (Whittington or ICB)
  • 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)

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

We have 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.

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 the council teams and partners working to improve outcomes for children and young people.

The Children and Young People (CYP) Integrated Data Set

The CYP Integrated Data Set is owned and managed by the council and contains personal data and special category information about children attending Haringey schools or who live in Haringey but attend schools in neighbouring authorities. It matches additional personal data from multiple data sources within Haringey 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 to improve outcomes for children and young people

The National Pupil Database (NPD) and SEN2 datasets 

The NPD and SEN 2 data sets are owned and managed by the Department of Education (DfE) and contain information about pupils in schools in England. They provide 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 and local authorities 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 and SEN2 database. The law that requires this is the Education (Information About Individual Pupils) (England) Regulations 2013.

The DfE may share information about our pupils from the NPD and SEN2 data sets 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
  • retention and use of the data

For privacy information on the data the Department for Education collects and uses, please see:

The Home to School Travel Assistance Data Set

The Home to School Travel Assistance Data Set is owned and managed by the council and contains personal data and special category information about children and young people who live in Haringey and require Home to School travel Assistance. 

We use personal data for the following purposes:

  • provide travel assistance services to eligible children and young people
  • inform future service delivery planning and integrated working to ensure children are able to travel to school safely
  • communicate with service users regarding service delivery updates
  • 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 delivery

Your rights

Please see our corporate privacy statement and data protection pages for more details on your right to:

  • be informed
  • access your personal data
  • rectify your personal data if it is incorrect
  • restrict our processing of your personal data

You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about the way we are handling your personal information:

Make a complaint to the ICO

If you do find that the information we hold on you is incorrect, you should inform us as soon as possible to update our records.

If you would like to exercise a right, please email the Information Governance Team at Data.ProtectionAct@haringey.gov.uk

We keep this privacy notice under regular review, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

Processor list

Liquid Logic

Purpose: Information Management System

ContrOCC

Purpose: Payment information

COM Software Limited aka Missions Software

Purpose: Transport planning

Synergy

Purpose: Information Management System

Egress

Purpose: Secure communication