Early Years Education in Carmarthenshire

1. The purpose for which we use your personal data

When delivering early years education service, the Council and Early Years service providers are jointly responsible for the personal data we use about you and your child.

Under data Protection legislation we are therefore considered to be ‘joint data controllers’.

• The Council and the Early Years service providers are each responsible for:
• The lawful processing of personal data
• Informing you about the use of your personal data, such as via Privacy Notices
• The security of your information
• Ensuring that you can exercise your rights under the Data Protection legislation

Collecting information about individual children is essential to ensure that the education provision and service offered is of the highest quality, purposeful, and responsive to the needs of your child.
The information we collect about you and your child in the application and during the service period will only be used for the following purposes:

• To process your application for early years funding and for the provision of funding
• Monitoring provision standards and children’s learning progress
• Identify areas of need across the County, for example, oracy, numeracy, physical information to feed improvement strategies
• To plan strategically to ensure that relevant support is provided to each setting in accordance with the needs of individual children
• To measure the effectiveness of the provision and support provided by the Council
• To design an appropriate training programme according to both the needs of the Early Years service providers and their children
• To ensure public funding and grants are used purposefully according to need e.g. literacy needs
• To identify and provide early intervention to support Additional Learning Needs
• To improve and facilitate communication during transition periods.

Section 118(1) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 requires local authorities to secure the provision of sufficient part-time and full-time nursery education for children in their area who are not of compulsory school age. Therefore, the lawful basis for collecting and using this personal data is that we need it to exercise our authority to provide part time early years education to children.

2. What type of information do we use?

We collect the following types of personal data to deliver this service:

About you:

• Your email address
• Your title, first name and surname
• Your home address

About your child:

• Your child’s name
• Your child’s address
• Your child’s date of birth
• Details of chosen setting and number of hours of funding applied for
• Details of school applied to for full time education
• The language spoken in your home
• Your child’s attendance record
• Your child’s learning attainment

We also collect details of medical or learning needs where this is applicable.
We use this type of personal data to exercise our obligations under the legislation referred to above.

3. Do we use information received from other sources?

We normally collect personal data directly from you.

However, early years education service does receive some information from the early years service provider, specifically personal data about the wellbeing of your child, their attendance and the progress they are making.

We may also use certain details from our schools database (Teacher Centre) that you have previously provided in your application for full time education.

4. Transferring your information abroad

We also use Microsoft Office 365 to process all of electronic documents under the terms of a strict agreement, which safeguards your information. 

This personal data is hosted on servers outside the UK, but only in EU countries which are subject to the General Data Protection Regulation.

We don’t transfer any other information about you outside of the UK.

5. Who has access to your information?

We only share personal data when there is a need for us to do so and provide the minimum necessary in each case.

If your application is successful, we will share this information with the non-maintained setting that you have applied to in order to process the provision of funding.  We will also share this information with the school that you have applied to for full time education.

We may share your information with Welsh Government at a statistical level when required to do so.

There are also specific situations where we may be required to disclose information about you, such as:

• Where the Council is required to provide the information by law
• Where disclosing the information is required to prevent or detect a crime

Where disclosure is in the vital interests of the person concerned

6. How long we will keep your information

We’ll keep the personal data for 18 years from the date of birth of your child.

7. Your Data Protection rights

You have the right to:

• Obtain access to the personal data that Carmarthenshire Council is processing about you
• Have any inaccurate or incomplete information rectified (corrected)
• Withdraw your consent to processing, where this is the only basis for the processing
• Make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the independent body in the UK which protects information rights

In some circumstances, you may have the right to:

• Object to the processing of your personal information
• The erasure of your personal data
• Restrict the processing of your personal information
• Data portability

8. Contact details

For more information regarding this privacy notice and your rights, please contact:

Data Protection Officer
Carmarthenshire County Council
County Hall
Carmarthen
SA31 1JP

Email: dataprotection@carmarthenshire.gov.uk

Contact details for the Information Commissioner’s Office along with further guidance on Data Protection legislation can be found on the ICO website .