Fair Processing Notices
ListenBackground
To meet the requirements of the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998, schools need to issue a Fair Processing Notice (FPN) to pupils and parents summarising the information held about pupils, why it is held, and the third parties to whom it may be passed on.
Requirements
The DPA requires that data is only shared with the data subject (or their parents/carers in the case of children under 13). Many schools send out fair processing notices at the start of each academic year. As a minimum an FPN must be sent to parents/carers when the child starts school and also direct to the pupil when they reach the age of 13.
In order to ensure that the data held about the pupil is correct, many schools carry out a periodic exercise to review what data is held and what additional data is required. The introduction, for ContactPoint, of providing contact details about parents, could impose a burden on schools in having to write to all parents and carers about whom they hold data. However, they should write only to the principal parent/carer with a list of the data fields that are required for ContactPoint asking them to contact the school if they are aware that the details have changed.
The FPN needs to cover the rights of parents or pupils to opt out from the provision of information to the Connexions services under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
In response to comments received in 2008, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has broken down the FPN into two layers, Layer One is a brief one-page notice available from your child's school, Layer Two is the full FPN which gives information about the organisations who have access to information and the uses they make of it. As suggested by the DCSF, Layer Two is available as a download from this page - one version for primary schools and one version for secondary and special schools.
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