School Admissions Service Privacy Notice

This notice provides privacy information for the parents and carers of children and young people of statutory school age and those seeking admission to schools

Purpose

We collect, or obtain your personal information for the following purpose(s):

• To enable us to carry out the admission functions, for which we are responsible, fairly and transparently
• To monitor children missing from education
• To derive statistics that inform decisions such as providing sufficient school places as required by the Department for Education (DfE)

Categories of personal data

In order to carry out these purposes we collect and obtain:

• Information supplied by an applicant (personal identifiers and contacts such as name, parents name, contact details and address)
• Reasons for the application
• Independent confirmation of address details if required
• a child or young person’s looked after status (but not the specific details)
• a child or young person’s special educational needs status (but not the details of the need)
• a child or young person’s unique pupil number
• expressions of parental preferences
• relevant application information (sibling details, faith criteria, free school meal/pupil premium eligibility where provided by the applicant)
• details of the allocated school
• any previous schools attended
• a child or young person’s travel assistance eligibility
• a child or young person’s permanent exclusions (and any relevant alternative provision placements put in place)
• safeguarding information about a child or young person’s (such as alerts, court orders and professional involvement)

Legal basis for processing

Although the primary basis for processing your personal information is to determine your application, the legal basis is to ensure that the Service meets its statutory duty in relation to:

• The statutory requirements of the School Admissions Code as detailed in Chapter 1 of Part 3 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998
• Section 86 of the SSFA 1998
• Section 94 of the SSFA
• The School Admissions (Admission Arrangements and Co-ordination of Admission Arrangements) (England) Regulations 2012;
• The School Admissions (Infant Class Sizes) (England) Regulations 2012;c) The School Admissions (Appeals) (England) Regulations 2012; and
• The School Information (England) Regulations 2008

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to effectively deal with your application.

Information sharing/recipients

We may share personal information about you with the following organisations:

• other local authorities for the purposes of coordinating admissions
• schools, to facilitate the admission of a child or to track pupil destinations
• Independent Appeal Panels
• Oldham’s Fair Access Panels
• Other relevant departments of Oldham Council
• The Department for Education (DfE) collects personal data from educational settings and local authorities via various statutory data collections. We are required to share the information we hold with the Department for Education (DfE) for the purpose of the primary and secondary level school preference collections.
• The Office of the Schools Adjudicator
• The Local Government Ombudsman
• The Education Funding Agency

We do not share information with anyone else without consent unless the law and our policies allow us to do so.

As well as information collected directly from you, we also obtain or receive information:

• in submissions by applicants (parents/carers) to other local authorities
• from schools and nurseries
• from Oldham’s Early Years Service
• from Oldham’s Council Tax Service

Some elements of the decisions we make about you are automated but all involve human intervention.

Data retention/criteria 

We will only keep your personal information for as long as the law specifies or where the law does not specify this, for the length of time determined by our business requirements.

Where can I get advice?

More information on how to seek advice in order to exercise your rights, raise a concern or complain about the handling of your personal information by the council can be found in the council’s privacy notice which can be found at:

Data Protection - web page

Updates (notice)

We may update or revise this Privacy Notice at any time so please refer back to this page for the most up-to-date version.