Telephone: (01798) 865419 

E-mail: head@fittleworth.school

School Lane, Fittleworth, West Sussex, RH20 1JB

Dear Parents/Carers

Re: Privacy Notices: Information about pupils in schools, alternative provision, pupil referral units and children in early years settings

By law we are required to provide the information shown below to you. It is a requirement of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and the EU General Date Protection Regulation (GDPR). The most common way to provide this information for you is in a privacy notice. (Please see below)

Data Protection Act 1998: How we use pupil information

We collect and hold personal information relating to our pupils and may also receive information about them from their previous school, local authority and/or the Department for Education (DfE). We use this personal data to:

• support our pupils’ learning
• monitor and report on their progress
• provide appropriate pastoral care; and
• assess the quality of our services

This information will include their contact details, national curriculum assessment results, attendance information, any exclusion information, where they go after they leave us and personal characteristics such as their ethnic group, any special educational needs they may have as well as relevant medical information. For pupils enrolling for post 14 qualifications, the Learning Records Service will give us the unique learner number (ULN) and may also give us details about your learning or qualifications.

We will not give information about our pupils to anyone without your consent unless the law and our policies allow us to do so. If you want to receive a copy of the information about your son/daughter that we hold, please contact:

Mrs Liz Wilmshurst 01798 865419 or lwilmshurst@fittleworth.school

We are required, by law, to pass certain information about our pupils to our local authority (LA) and the Department for Education (DfE).

Yours faithfully

Mrs Liz Wilmshurst

The Data Protection Act 1998: How the Local Authority uses your information

The Local Authority (LA) uses information about children and young people to enable them to carry out specific functions for which they are responsible. They also use this personal data to derive statistics which inform decisions they make, for example, regarding the funding of schools, assessing their performance and to set targets for them. These statistics are used in such a way that individual children cannot be identified.

Youth Support Services - For pupils aged 13 and over, schools are legally required to pass certain information to the provider of Youth Support Services in their area. This is the local authority support service for young people in England who are aged 13 to 19.

Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) use information about pupils for research and statistical purposes, to develop, monitor and evaluate the performance of local health services. These statistics will not identify individual pupils. It is necessary for certain health information about children (for example, such as their height and weight) to be retained for a certain period of time (designated by the Department of Health) and requires these PCTs to maintain children’s names and addresses for this purpose. PCTs may also provide individual schools and Local Authorities (LAs) with aggregated health information which will not identify individual children.

Education and training: The LA holds information about young people living in our area, including about their education and training history. This is to support the provision of their education up to the age of 20 (and beyond this age for those with a special education need or disability). Education institutions and other public bodies (including the Department for Education (DfE), police, probation and health services) may pass information to the LA to help them to do this. 

The LA shares some of the information it collects with the Department for Education (DfE) to enable them to; produce statistics, assess performance, determine the destinations of young people after they have left school or college and to evaluate Government funded programmes.

The LA may also share information with post-16 education and training providers to secure appropriate support for them. They may also share data with education establishments which shows what their pupils go on to do after the age of 16. 

For children under 16, a parent or guardian can ask that no information other than their child’s name, address and date of birth (or their own name and address) be passed to a local authority. This right transfers to the child on their 16th birthday. Pupils and/or a parent/guardian will need to inform the school/LA if this is what they wish.   DfE may share individual level personal data that we or the LA supplies to them with third parties. This will only take place where legislation allows it to do so and it is in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998.

Decisions on whether DfE releases this personal data to third parties are subject to a robust approval process and are 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 level data, requestors must comply with strict terms and conditions covering the confidentiality and handling of data, security arrangements and retention and use of the data.

• For more information on how this sharing process works, please visit GOV.UK.
• For information on which third party organisations (and for which project) pupil level data has been provided to, please visit GOV.UK.
• If you require more information about how we and/or DfE store and use your personal data please visit GOV.UK.

If you want to see a copy of information about you that the LA holds, please contact the Data Protection Officer: