Wakefield Families Together Early Help, Intervention & Prevention
Privacy Notice
Wakefield Council respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will inform you as to how we look after your personal data and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.
Who are we?
Wakefield Families Together (WFT) is an umbrella term to describe our partnership approach to delivering on our vision for Wakefield, one where children and young people tell us they are happy, healthy, and safe, and are thriving in communities and where families and services work together for our children and young people to achieve their potential and dreams.
WFT Family Hubs are a one-stop shop where parents, carers, and young people can walk-in, email, or telephone to access whole family support. You can also ask for early help from your child’s school and request a ‘Team around the School’ (TAS) meeting or at your child’s nursery and ask for a ‘Team around the Early Years’ (TAEY) meeting. The TAS/TAEY is an offer of early help to families that brings together a team of professionals from a range of services and partner organisations to help you to access support when you find it hard to cope with the demands of family life.
What are Early Help Services and who will we share information with?
Early Help and support are provided as local as possible at the earliest opportunity, by the right Council service and through our partner organisations such as schools, nurseries, school nursing, Health Visitors, Mental Health services and from partners who have specialist skills and knowledge to help you access a range of interventions, advice, guidance, targeted early help for yourself, your partner, your children and for your whole family.
It will depend on the needs of your family and what you would like help with, services could include support from but not limited to:
- Family Hubs and the Early Intervention & Prevention team
- School Nursing
- Youth Hubs
- Emotional Health and Well-being Services and the Future in Mind team
- Health Visiting Service
- Voluntary & Community Sector and their Family Support Workers
- Education Welfare Officers
- Drug and Alcohol Service and their specialist workers
- Wakefield District Housing and their Tenancy team and Cash Wise teams
- Skills and Employment Services
- Inclusion & Education Service and teams in SEND and Educational Improvement teachers
- Nursery Providers and Early Years specialist workers/teachers
- Parenting Services and support
- Police & Police Early Action Hub
The organisation who takes a lead on the work with you and your family will be act as data controller, where this is not the Council joint control will be maintained.
Why is your agreement to take up our offer of early help services important to us?
We use your information to deliver early help services, without your agreement we cannot provide you with a service. We will always explain what we are doing with your information, who we will share it with and importantly why. This means that there will be no surprises as to who is involved with you and your family. If you have any concerns about your information being shared, then speak to your link worker – they will explain why it’s necessary, how this will help you and explain that you can withdraw from the service at any time.
Information gathered from the referral process, meetings and family assessments is stored securely by the council and retained for six years from finishing our work with your family. There may be other times when we need to retain documents for longer in line with our statutory duty to safeguard children.
What personal information do we collect and who is it about?
We will collect information from you and your family to help us complete a request for support form and if a more coordinated support package is needed from Targeted Early Help to complete a Family Assessment. This will include information about you, your child(ren) and other members of your household. We need this to enable us to do the assessment of your child and to understand your whole family’s needs.
This information will include:
- Personal information (such as name, address, contact details, date of birth, gender)
- Special category characteristics (such as ethnicity and disability)
- Reasons for support (such as what is working well and what you are worried about)
- Assessment and family plan information (such as further details of your concerns and challenges, and how we are going to work together to bring about the changes you want to see)
- Details of services that you have accessed through us, our partners or your child’s school
- Any additional personal information that is necessary to enable us to provide you with the correct service.
Where relevant we also obtain personal information from the following other sources:
- Attendance and exclusion information (such as sessions attended, number of absences, reasons, details to support statutory processes), pupil characteristics, and unique pupil number, from your child’s school
- Details of any special educational needs for young people
- Information about your additional requirements from health; mental health needs, midwives, school nursing and health visitors
- Housing information
- National Insurance number, NHS number
- Details of any criminal offences (such as youth offending, domestic abuse, young person missing from home, crime, and anti-social behaviour) from the Police
- Details of victims of youth crime from the Police (where consent has been given)
- Involvement with other services from our existing records
- Details of adults out of work or at risk of financial exclusion or young people at risk of worklessness from Department of Work and Pensions
- Recordings of phone calls to the Front Door Service
Why do we ask for personal information and what do we do with it?
Personal information is asked for during the ‘Team around’ and the Early Help support process in order to ensure that decisions, assessment and planning captures family needs, what you are worried about and family strengths. This enables the link worker supporting you to identify the right services who may be able to offer support to you and your family.
Information is shared with performance, data, and internal audit teams to:
- fulfil the requirements of the national Supporting Families Programme, through an outcomes framework which describes the range of support we offer in Early Help and the difference that support can make
- evaluate and quality assure the services we provide, including seeking your feedback on the services you and your family have received
- analyse service provision and effectiveness, and model patterns of service involvement to support future service delivery planning
The Council has statutory duties to improve the well-being of children and families in Wakefield. Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 puts a duty on the local authority to provide services to children in need in their area and Section 10 of the Children’s Act 2004 places a duty on the councils to improve wellbeing and to work with partners to do this. The Department for Education has also published Working Together to Safeguard Children which puts an emphasis on identifying families who would benefit from early help.
In data protection legislation, we need to identify a legal basis for processing personal data. For Early Help services, we do so because we need to process personal information to perform our public duties in line with Article 6 (1) (e) of the GDPR. We process special category data in line with Article 9 2(g) of the GDPR as it is for the provision of health and social care, processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest. Schedule 1 Section 10 of the DPA 2018 applies so we can hold information for statutory and government purposes, preventing and detecting unlawful acts and safeguarding of children and of individuals at risk.
This Privacy Notice was updated December 2022 and will be reviewed every 2 years.
Your ‘Rights’ when accessing early help and support explained
You have the right to withdraw from early help services at any time and the right to:
- know what we are doing with your information and why we are doing it
- ask to see what information we hold about you (subject access request)
- ask us to correct any mistakes in the information we hold about you
- make a complaint to the Information Commissioners Office Make a complaint | ICO
- withdraw your agreement to work with our early help support services at any time
The Controller for the information we hold at Wakefield Council can be contacted at:
- Contact details: Email: dataprotection@wakefield.gov.uk
- The Council’s Data Protection Officer is the Corporate Information Governance Team Manager. Contact details: Telephone: 01924 306112 Email: dpo@wakefield.gov.uk
Further information on the Council Privacy Notice can be found at:
