The services process personal information in order to assess your child's eligibility for school transport assistance either directly or jointly with partners and commissioned private and third sector providers. This includes:

• assessing Mainstream School Transport Applications
• assessing Special Education Transport Applications
• administering and Managing School Transport Appeals

The services process personal information in order to assess your child's eligibility for school transport assistance either directly or jointly with partners and commissioned private and third sector providers. This includes:

• your personal information (such as your name and address)
• your child’s personal information (such as their name, address and current school)
• details about your household income, where parents apply for low income assessment
• your child’s monthly attendance where parents have been provided a Personal Transport Budget/ Direct Travel Payment

We may also process some special category (sensitive) information, which is relevant to individual cases and may include some of the following but is not limited to:

• Education Health and Care Plan status and detail of any Special Educational Needs

The legal bases for processing this personal information are:

• necessary to carry out tasks in the public interest in the official authority of the Data Controller
• necessary for the performance of a contract

The special category personal data condition(s) for processing are:

• reasons of substantial public interest. We rely on the ‘equality of opportunity or treatment’ purpose condition from Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

We may need to share the personal information you have given to us or we’ve collected about you with partner organisations where relevant to the individual and/or their service provision. These include but are not limited to:

• teams within the Council working to improve outcomes for children and young people
• transport teams within the Council
• commissioned providers of local authority services
• schools
• the gov.uk Notify Service, which sends out postal correspondence on our behalf

Subject to strict agreements describing how it will be used, your information will also be shared with:

• third party providers of software solutions used to manage the transport provision

Information will only ever be shared when it is strictly necessary to help us provide effective services and you may have the right to refuse. We will not pass it onto any other parties unless required to do so by law or in all reasonable circumstances the disclosure is fair and warranted for the purposes of processing or subject to a data protection exemption.

We have specific data sharing agreements in place with local agencies and sometimes the law requires that we may have to pass your details on to a third party, for example, to prevent crime.

The standard record retention for a School Transport request record is 6 years from the end of the academic year. However, there are also a range of other retention periods affecting different types of information and service needs and these range from 2 years to 6 years depending on the type of information and service. More information about our retention periods can be found in our summary Disposal Schedule.

Please note stated retention periods may be subject to any legal holds imposed under the Inquiries Act 2005 that may concern the information and override standard retention periods.

You are entitled to a copy, or a description, of the personal data we hold that relates to you, subject to lawful restrictions. Please go to our Make a Data Protection Request webpage to find out how to make a request.

You may be entitled to rectification, restriction, objection, and erasure of your personal information depending on the service and legal basis. Please in the first instance contact dataprotection@worcestershire.gov.uk to exercise these Information Rights or call the main Worcestershire County Council contact telephone number of 01905 765765.

Please see our overarching Worcestershire County Council Privacy Notice for further contact details and if you have a complaint about your information rights.