Privacy notice - Ethnic Minority Achievement Team

The Ethnic Minority Achievement Team (EMAT) is a team of professionals including teachers, teaching assistants, an educational welfare officer, and family support workers. Our aim is to work in partnership with schools to support pupils with English as an additional language (EAL), and Traveller, fair and circus pupils, to access high-quality education.

As a service, we:

• support and promote the educational achievement of BAME students
• provide the welcome service for International New Arrivals (INA), and support them to access school and educational opportunities
• offer targeted support in-school to promote EAL across the curriculum and support EAL learners to achieve, in partnership with schools
• act as an important link between school and home, attending admissions meetings and providing translation and interpreting services to help with communication between school and home
• provide and promote cultural awareness
• deliver training, including bespoke training packages in school
• assess students' language upon first arrival to accurately identify need, and provide a focus on pupil progression
• attend meetings and network with other professionals working with EAL learners and their families to ensure a co-ordinated approach
• provide in-school support to Traveller, fair and circus students and family liaison to improve attendance and educational opportunities

We will use paper forms during a face to face interview to collect personal information to deliver the service to support your child’s education.

We may collect the following types of Personal Data:

• Your name, address, email address, telephone number and other contact information that allow us to meet our organisational and statutory obligations as an education provider
• Details of family members and Next of Kin details;
• Date of birth
• Photographic Identification documentation
• Ethnicity
• Nationality
• Country of origin and/or nationality
• Medical Information
• Dietary requirements
• Language(s) spoken
• Previous Schooling
• Estimated length of stay in UK
• Reason for stay in UK
• Date of arrival in UK
• Religion
• Household members details
• Proficiency of pupil’s home languages
• Proficiency of pupil’s academic languages
• Proficiency of pupil’s other languages

The Ethnic Minority Achievement Team use following legal basis to process your personal and special category information:

• processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person;
• processing is necessary for the performance of a task carries out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller
• the data subject has given explicit consent;

• The personal information we hold is provided by you in your parental interview and school admission form.
• To apply for a school place and identify appropriate services to signpost you to.
• We may need to verify the identity and prior schooling of your child(ren) applying for a school place in Middlesbrough.
• To inform schools whether additional language or cultural considerations need to be made.
• For monitoring and evaluation purposes to help improve the attainment of all children in the Local Authority.

The Ethnic Minority Achievement Team will share this information with the other Local Authority departments as part of a larger information sharing agreement. The Ethnic Minority Achievement Team will share this information with partner agencies, such as schools and 0 – 19 Healthy Child Team. This information will be used for monitoring and evaluation purposes within the Local Authority. 

We routinely share pupil information with:

• schools that your child(ren) attend
• the Local Authority
• the Department for Education (DfE)
• NHS (for inoculations, etc.)

The security of your personal information is important to us. This is why we follow a range of security policies and procedures to control and safeguard access to and use of your personal information.

After we deliver a service to you, we have to keep your information as a business record of what was delivered. The type service will determine how long we have to keep it. Our corporate retention schedule show how long we keep it for different services.

The retention periods for this service are as follows.

• Most of your case file is held for 6 years.
• Data relating to Admission & Transfers will be held for 6 years.
• Data relating to Appeals will be held until the child’s 25th birthday 
• Data relating to School Places will be held for 6 years.

At no time will the Ethnic Minority Achievement Team send personal information outside the EEC to be processed.

At no time will your information be passed to organisations external to us and our partners for marketing or sales purposes or for any commercial use without your prior express consent.

Your Information Rights are set out in law and, subject to some exceptions, you have the:

• Right to rectification - to ask for information to be corrected
• Right to erasure - to have your personal data deleted
• Right to object - to how your data is used
• Right to restriction - to request limits on how your data is used
• Right to portability - to request that we move your data to another organisation
• Right of subject access - to request a copy of data the Council holds about you

If you have a concerns about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, you should raise your concern with us in the first instance or directly to the Information Commissioner's Office. Visit the website of the Information Commissioner's Office.

If you would like to discuss anything in this privacy notice or your information rights, please contact:

The Data Protection Officer
Middlesbrough Council
PO Box 500, Middlesbrough, TS1 9FT
Phone: 01642 245432
Email: dataprotection@middlesbrough.gov.uk