Privacy Notice

Confidence about your personal information and data

Attendance Plus Limited is committed to complying with the General Data Protection Regulation, Data protection Act 2018 and all other relevant privacy and data protection legislation. We treat the privacy of our employees, customers, website users, subscribers and other stakeholders very seriously and have put in place appropriate security measures to safeguard and secure the information that we collect from you. By visiting or otherwise using our website you are agreeing to the practices set out in this Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Notice will help you to understand how we protect and manage any personal data you share with us and that we hold about you, including:

  • How and why Attendance Plus collect information from you when you use our services;
  • Who we share your information with, why and on what basis;
  • What your rights over your data are.
Important information if you are a child or young adult

Our website and services are not directly for you, we work for the schools and your parents and legal guardian although the information we use is about you.  We may have been asked by your school to undertake an assessment of your attendance or sickness record at school. This is because schools are required by law to provide you with an education and you are expected to attend school.  If you are experiencing problems at school, we can help you to sort them out.  If you are at all worried about the information we hold about you, our assessment process, or have any other concerns such as problems at home or school, we would ask you to speak with a responsible adult or make use of services such as ChildLine by calling 0800 1111 free of charge.

We are not allowed to directly talk with you without a teacher or a parent being present.

Who We Are
  • We are Attendance Plus Limited, a limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 10227687.
  • Our registered address is Aquila House, Waterloo Lane, Chelmsford CM1 1BN.
  • You can email us at [email protected] and you can telephone us on 07512 287262
  • The Information Commissioners Office requires us to pay a ‘data protection fee’ and our registration number with the ICO is ZA485727.
  • Our data protection officer is Xynics Data Solutions Limited, Newton House, Northampton Science Park, Moulton Park, Northampton, NN3 6LG. 
  • We are the Data Controller for any personal data for any personal data you give to us.
  • We are a Data Processor of information passed to us from Education Establishments in relation to assessments and progressing student attendance concerns.
  • We are a member of the Association for Education Welfare Management (AEWM).
How we collect your personal data
Information provided to us by you or by schools

If you are a parent or guardian and your child has been referred to us by their school, we will be passed information about you and your child by the school. They should have already made you aware of this process and what information they will have shared with us, but it will include at least:

  • You name and postal address;
  • Your telephone and/or mobile phone number;
  • Your child’s name, date of birth and attendance record;
  • During our assessment process we may collect additional information about you directly from you.

We will process this information under our own and your Legitimate Interests to meet a schools Legal Obligation. The information will be used only to perform our assessment and create a plan to address any issues and will be retained until your child’s 18th birthday as we are required to do to allow schools to comply with their legal obligations.

If you are a professional involved in safeguarding children, a medical professional, legal professional or other person involved in the attendance process or child welfare, we will hold:

  • Your name, agency and postal address;
  • Contact telephone number and/or mobile phone number;
  • The services you provide and any children we are aware of that you are working with.

We will process this information under our own Legitimate Interests to meet a schools Legal Obligation. The information will be used only to perform our assessment and execute a plan to address any issues and will be retained until the child’s 18th birthday as we are required to do to allow schools to comply with their legal obligations.

When you make a direct or online enquiry to us

When you submit an enquiry via our website, or correspond with us by telephone, email, letter or otherwise we ask for your name, school name/local authority/organisation, email address, telephone number and job title.

We use this information to respond to your query, including providing you with any requested information about our products and services. We may also email you several times after your enquiry in order to follow up on your interest and ensure that we have answered your query to your satisfaction. We will do this based on our performance of a contract to respond to you and provide accurate information prior to our engagement to perform services for you.

More about how long we keep information about you?

In all cases our need to use your personal information will be reassessed on a regular basis and information which is no longer required will be securely disposed of.

Other than specified above, we will only keep your personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purpose(s) it was collected for, and to comply with our or our clients legal, regulatory and contractual obligations. The time period we retain your personal information for may differ depending on the nature of the personal information and what we do with it. How long we keep personal information is primarily determined by our own or our client’s regulatory obligations. We typical keep pupil data only until the end of their full-time education however in some cases, such as if there is a dispute or legal action, we may be required to keep personal information for longer until those proceedings have concluded, and no further appeals or proceedings are possible.

We may additionally keep your personal information for up to seven years from the date any contract with you comes to an end as we are legally required or entitled to do so under our legitimate interests.

How and where we store or transfer your personal data

We will store your personal data in the UK, or upon secure encrypted servers hosted outside of the EEA with contracts and recognised adequacy agreements in place with those providers or countries, such as Canada. This means that your information will be fully protected under the GDPR.

The security of your personal data is essential to us and to protect it from unauthorised access, use, loss or disclosure, we take a number of important measures, including the following:

  • Hard copy personal data is stored in locked cabinets with controlled access by the us;
  • Our computer hardware is encrypted and all file storage and access are also encrypted which means that no data is held unencrypted on computers, laptops or other electronic devices;
  • Technical support and system back-ups are in place. This means that should our systems encounter difficulties, our tech support will respond same day and ensure robust measures are taken to secure data.
Cookies

Cookies are small text files that are stored on your browser or your device when you visit a website, this allows a website to recognise a user’s device. They are not harmful and do not contain any personal information such as your home address, data of birth or contact details.

The cookies we use do not collect personal data however, you may choose to block or delete cookies in your internet browser settings if you wish. If you do so, this may affect your ability to use our website.

You can find more information about managing and disabling cookies on your computer at: www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies and http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/

List of cookies

Attendance Plus: Performance (site id), used by our hosting provider (Godaddy) to identify our website.

Sharing information

It is a necessary part of our service to work with a number of trusted partners to support parents and their children’s education. Your information may be shared with suppliers, education and local authorities, agencies and businesses, to help us to perform our consultation, attendance casework and training services for our partners. These third parties are prohibited from using your personal information or any purpose other than in relation to these services and to adhere to our privacy and data protection policies.

We will only disclose your information with other third parties with your explicit consent with the exception of the following categories of third parties:

  • Educational institutions (e.g. schools, local authorities and children’s social care), regulatory authorities (including recognised practitioner bodies), the department of education and Ofsted);
  • Health service providers in relation to your child’s physical or mental health (e.g. GP’s, psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy or other specialists);
  • Legal or crime prevention agencies, youth offending and HM Courts to comply with any legal and regulatory issues, disclosures, prosecution or bringing or defending legal claims;
  • Any IT service providers, document management providers, contractors and advisors that provide a service to us or act as our agents on the understanding that they keep the information confidential.
What are your rights?

You are entitled to request the following from Attendance Plus, free of charge. These are called your Data Subject Rights and to learn more about these, please see the Information Commissioners website https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/

Your information is just that, yours.  To ensure we protect the confidentiality of your information, we may ask you to verify your identity, and if necessary, your authority to make a request before we proceed with that request. If you are authorising another person to make a request on your behalf, we will ask them to prove they have your permission to act. This must be a written authority to make the request or it might be a more general power of attorney.

Subject to some legal exceptions, you (or your authorised representative) have the right to:

Be informed

You have a right to be told, in clear, concise and plain language, what information we collect, why we collect it, how it will be used, where it will be store and who it may be shared with. This Privacy Policy is just one part of our transparency to you in this respect. Whenever we collect data from you, we will ensure you are fully aware of why the collection and processing of that information is necessary.

Access or obtain a copy of information we hold about you

If you make such a request, we shall endeavour to respond promptly within one calendar month of receiving your valid authorised request.  We will always keep you fully informed of our progress and in some cases, particularly if a request is more complex, more time may be required to respond. If it is necessary extend our response deadline, this will never be more than three calendar months from the day after we receive that request.

A subject access request is free of charge in most cases, unless they are deemed to be “manifestly unfounded or excessive”, in which case we will either; charge a reasonable fee to cover our administrative costs in responding; or refuse to action the request.

Our formal response shall include details of the personal data we hold about you, including the following:

  • Sources from which we acquired the information;
  • The purposes for processing the information;
  • Persons or categories with whom we are sharing the information.
Have any inaccurate or incomplete information rectified

You can ask us to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal information be completed.

Have your data erased (also known as the Right to be Forgotten)

If we are processing your personal data with your consent or under a legitimate interest, you can request that your data be erased without undue delay.

Restrict how we store or process your information
  • You can ask us to restrict how we use your personal information where;
  • the accuracy of the personal data is contested by you. In these cases, we will restrict our processing until the accuracy of the data has been verified;
  • You have objected to processing of your personal data pending the verification of whether there are legitimate grounds for us to override these objections;
  • We no longer need the personal data for the purposes we obtained it for, but you require us to keep it for you to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim;
  • The processing is unlawful and you oppose the erasure of the personal data and instead request the restriction in its use.
Ask for a copy of your information to be sent to another service provider

If we are processing your personal data for reasons of consent or to fulfil a contract, you can ask us to give you a copy of the information in a commonly used and machine-readable format so that you can transfer it to another data controller.

Object to some or all of our processing

Except where our processing is necessary to perform a contract for you, or where it is carried out in the public interest or with official authority vested in us by a public authority, you can ask us to stop processing your personal data for a particular purpose or in its entirety. Unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing, which override your interests, rights and freedoms, or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, we shall stop processing your data for those purposes in its entirety.

Not to be the subject of decisions based solely upon automated

You have a right for any decisions made by automated means to be reviewed by a human being. Attendance Plus do not use any information you provide or provided to us to make automated decisions that might affect you.

Withdraw consent

If we have asked for your consent to process your personal data for any reason, you may withdraw that consent at any time.

Important information

Questions and queries

We understand that some people may have questions, would like more clarity on how we handle their personal information, or may wish to make a Data Subject Request.

If you have any questions or queries which are not answered by this Privacy Policy, or have any concerns about how we may use the personal data we hold, please contact the Data Protection Team on 07512 287262 or via email [email protected]

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We regularly review and, update this Privacy Policy to ensure that we meet the highest standards of transparency, accountability and to protect your privacy.  We will try to ensure that anyone whose data we hold, are informed of any significant changes to our processing that may affect them, either directly or by a notice on our website homepage. We would in any event, encourage you review this Privacy Policy periodically to ensure that you are aware of any changes may have been made.

If we want to make use of your personal data in a way that we haven’t previously identified, we will contact you to provide information about this and, if necessary, to ask for your consent.

This Privacy Policy is version 201901-1 and is effective from the 1st January 2019.

If you have a complaint

We try our best to be transparent and treat the information we hold with the strictest of confidence and in adherence with our legal obligations. We encourage you to discuss any issues or concerns with our Data Protection Team, and if we cannot resolve your query to your satisfaction, you may then raise this with the UK supervisory authority, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO).

You can contact the ICO by:

  • Telephone on 0303 123 1113;
  • Via their website at www.ico.org.uk/concerns;
  • Write to them at Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.

ICO Reference Number ZA485727

Copyright 2023 Attendance Plus Limited