Stronger Families Privacy Notice - Early Help and Schools

Families with a range of problems often struggle to get the right help and support at the right time. To address this, the council is working across organisational boundaries with partner organisations to ensure that families with the most serious issues receive coordinated help and support when it is most needed.

We identify 'troubled families' using specified criteria and assign a key worker to act as a single point of contact for a coordinated package of support. To help us do this, we collect personal information that relates to you.

This might include records in relation to your social care, any involvement with the police, courts and probation, aspects relating to employment, anti-social behaviour, violence in the home, substance misuse, educational attendance and behaviour, vulnerable children and health issues.

Your information will be used to evaluate how successful and effective our services are at both a local and national level including evaluating current services to inform future design, deliver improved services to you and get a fuller picture of what you or your family's needs are. It will also be used to help us understand which public sector services you use, and how often you use them.

We collect personal information to make sure that we can carry out our work. The personal information we collect includes:

• Name, address and contact details, including telephone number and email address.
• Age, date of birth, gender and marital or civil partnership status.
• Ethnicity or nationality, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political opinions.
• Health or medical records, including disabilities.
• Criminal or offending data.
• Attainment or educational data.
• School attendance and behavioural data (for children).
• Financial information.
• Identifiers, such as National Insurance number.

When we collect personal information it may be about:

• Families.
• Parents and children.
• Carers.

We use your personal information to:

• Maintain accounts and records.
• Promote the services we provide.
• Provide support and guidance to individuals and families.
• Provide services focused on individuals and family health.
• Provide employment, education and training advice and support.
• Safeguard the welfare of children, young people and adults.
• Undertake research and evaluations of the programme to help us decide where to use resources and make sure our services are as effective as possible for you.

We're required by law to provide a Stronger Families programme. This is detailed in legislation and guidance including:

• Crime and Disorder Act 1998
• Children Act 1989
• Localism Act 2012
• Stronger Families Guidance
• Welfare Reform Act 2012

We're allowed to process personal and sensitive data for the following reasons under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Articles and the Data Protection Act:

• To comply with a legal obligation or statutory function.
• For public tasks.
• Substantial public interest.

We will collect and share information about you with different partners depending upon the services you need to receive and who will provide them. Confidential data will only be shared with members of the team who are supporting you. Anyone who receives information from Rochdale Borough Council has a legal duty to keep it confidential.

We collect information from and disclose information to individuals and organisations that can support our work including:

• Affected parties.
• Council departments.
• Healthcare organisations.
• Housing associations.
• Ombudsman and regulatory bodies.
• Other public bodies, for example, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA).
• Partner agencies, for example, the police and other Greater Manchester councils.
• Schools and higher education providers.
• Service providers.

We'll share some information with the National Evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme with the MHCLG and the Office for National Statistics, who link information from the council and other government departments together about families. This helps us find out how well the programme is working. This is important because it helps make sure that the programme is working well and you receive the best possible support. This information will not identify you personally and won't be used to make any decisions about you. The information is anonymised or de-personalised, and personal details are removed as soon as is possible.

The privacy notice for the evaluation of the Troubled Families programme has more information on what happens to your data.

You can speak to your project worker or contact DPO@rochdale.gov.uk about whether your data is being used for this project without it affecting your legal rights. You can also see copies of all the data the MHCLG hold about you and ask for it to be corrected or deleted by emailing the MHCLG's Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@communities.gov.uk.

• Early help support for families

Contact the team