Data Protection – information for school children and young people
East Sussex County Council holds personal information about children and young people. This information is shared with other organisations and protected under the Data Protection Act.
Who has information about you?
Schools – privacy notices for school pupils
Under the Data Protection Act, your school must send you a privacy notice outlining how they use and share personal information. They also share your information with East Sussex County Council.
Making sure you get the right help – ContactPoint
ContactPoint is an online list of children living in England. It helps people such as headteachers, doctors and social workers to:
- quickly identify you
- find out who else is working with you
- get in touch with each other
- make sure you get the right help at the right time.
For more information, see our page on ContactPoint.
Helping with your career choices – Connexions
Connexions is our information and advice service for all young people aged 13 to 19 living in East Sussex.
If you are in this age group, your school will give your name, address and other details to Connexions. They will use this information to help you make the best possible choices during your transition to adult life.
If you are 16 or older, you or your parent or carer can ask your school not to pass on any information to Connexions apart from your name and address.
You can also contact Connexions directly to ask them not to hold additional details about you. They will then delete these records from their database.
Improving health care – Primary Care Trusts
Sometimes we share your information with Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) who might use it for research and to monitor how well they are doing. This information is used in such a way that you cannot be identified from it.
If you want to know more, please contact your PCT:
What we do with your information
We keep information about you so that we can:
- arrange the right services for you
- plan and improve our services
- look into any concerns you may have about our services
- keep in touch with you.
We also give your information to other government organisations so they can monitor how we are doing and plan services for children across the UK.
Keeping your information safe
We keep information about you in a paper file and on a computer. There are strict controls about who can see your records. Nobody is allowed to see your information unless it will help them provide a service you need.
People working for East Sussex County Council must have security checks before they are allowed to handle your information. We always remove personal details such as names and addresses when we publish any information for monitoring or planning reasons.
Asking to see your information
Normally, you can ask the people who provide services to let you see the information they keep about you.
You can also ask to see your information using your rights under the Data Protection Act 1998. This is known as a Subject Access Request.
If you 12 or older, you can make a Subject Access Request yourself, but if you are under 12 your parent or carer must do this for you.
For more details on how you can ask to see your information, please see our pages on data protection.
Further enquiries
If you want to know more about how we use your information, please email the Planning and Performance Management Team: cs.dpa@eastsussex.gov.uk.
