Privacy notice – early years funding

North Somerset Council is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office for the purposes of processing personal data. The information you provide will be held and used in accordance with the requirements of UK and European data protection law. The information will form part of your early years funding entitlement account, and will be held for six years following the end of the current financial year.

Unless otherwise agreed with you, we will only collect the minimum personal data required to deliver the service, which includes name, contact details, date of birth, National Insurance number, gender, ethnicity, placement setting and dates, setting opening times, Ofsted URN and insurance details and hours claimed. It does not include information relating to criminal convictions or offences.

The information will be used to check a parent or guardian’s eligibility for a funded place; the provision of which being our statutory duty under the Education Act 1996, and is therefore lawful under Article 6(1)(c) of GDPR. We require the ethnicity data for monitoring purposes, which we consider to be lawful in accordance with Article 9(2)(g) of GDPR.

We will not use your personal information in a way that may cause you unwarranted nuisance. Failure to provide the information could result in us not being able to release the funding to you.

The information provided will be shared with the Department for Education, who have demonstrated that they have a lawful and legitimate interest in the information, for the purposes of determining North Somerset Council’s finding entitlement. The information is also shared with the individual early years settings via our secure online portal, in order for the settings to check eligibility for the funding. Your data is not shared or processed outside of the UK.

We may lawfully disclose information to public sector agencies to prevent or detect fraud or other crime, or to support the national fraud initiatives and protect public funds under the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. Under the conditions of the Digital Economy Act 2017, we may also share personal data provided to us with other public authorities as defined in the Act, for the purposes of fraud or crime detection or prevention, to recover monies owed to us, to improve public service delivery, or for statistical research. We do not share the information with other organisations for commercial purposes.

You have the right to see the personal data we process about you, as well as the right of rectification, and restriction to destruction of records only.

If you have any questions or concerns about the way we process your personal data, contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@n-somerset.gov.uk