Malachi Specialist Family Support Services CIC:

Privacy Policy

Who we are

We are Malachi Specialist Family Support Services CIC, whose principal site is at Billesley Ark, 725 Yardley Wood Road, Billesley, Birmingham B13 0PT. We are a Community Interest Company, working with schools, Councils, and agencies to identify and support families who are facing difficulties. Our director with responsibility for Data Protection (also referred to as our Data Protection Officer) is Tony Collins, who can be contacted by email via enquiry@malachi.org.uk

What information we process and why

We process personal data relating to our clients, their families, our staff, and our supporters and funders. Our clients include children and young people under the age of 18. We process personal data so that we can provide appropriate and consistent services to individuals who we support. Personal data about clients is processed on the basis of informed consent. Personal data about staff and funders is processed on the basis of the contract we have with you.

All data we process is in accordance with the rules as laid down in statute, including the General Data Protection Regulations, and the Data Protection Act 2018. We also follow statutory guidance as laid down in Keeping Children Safe in Education, to ensure that Safeguarding is a primary concern for all our staff.

Personal data we process about our clients and staff will include some basic details such as names, addresses, contact details and dates of birth. It may also include special categories of data which are:

1. Personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin.
2. Political opinions.
3. Religious or philosophical beliefs.
4. Trade union membership.
5. Genetic data and biometric data processed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person.
6. Data concerning health.
7. Data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation.

We always ask individuals whether they consent to information they share being recorded and stored by us. This includes information which is classified as being under a special category. We always explain to individuals that they can decline us recording this information without it then affecting the service we provide to them, or the role staff carry out for us.

We use personal data about clients to ensure that our workers fully understand the client, the situations they face, and can plan effective help and support.

We use personal data about our staff to ensure that we can support them in offering services to our clients, and to allow them to perform their professional roles in a secure and safe environment.

Where we rely on consent to process personal data about individuals we work with and provide services for, we ensure that we obtain that consent freely and in a positive manner. Anyone whose personal data is processed on the basis of informed consent can withdraw that consent easily and quickly.

Who will see your personal data

We will only share your information with people who have a legal or operational reason to see it. For clients, this could include colleagues and managers who are directly involved in planning, providing or supporting sessions with us. In the case of children, we may share some information with the child’s school or place or learning, if that is appropriate and will help the school plan for continued attendance and progress within the learning environment. With regard to parents, this could include anyone who needs to be involved in conversations about their child’s progress at school.

All staff personnel files are held securely, and are only available to senior management.

In certain circumstances, we may need to share information with partners including the Local Authority, Social Services or the Police. This will only be done where strictly necessary, and the information shared will be limited to what is appropriate to the specific circumstances. This could include any Safeguarding concerns we have, or information we believe may indicate that a child could be at risk of harm.

We share some information with our funders, in order to demonstrate to them that we are fulfilling the terms of our contract and using funds appropriately. This will be done using specific informed consent.

Data Retention – how long data will be kept

We keep some personal data for a period of time after we have stopped working with a client or a colleague.

Clients

Normally data would be retained for a period of 2 years and is only retained for longer when necessary to meet our statutory obligations.

Any personal data that we keep about our clients is securely stored on an encrypted database, with limited access for staff. It will not be accessed except in response to a question about what we did in that particular case. No decisions will be made about an individual based on this data and no one will suffer any detriment or harm by having it stored on our secure systems.

Members of Staff

Normally, a member of staff’s data will be retained for a period of 6 years after that colleague’s employment has ceased. Staff data includes address, period of employment, banking information, one-to-ones, disciplinaries and investigations. Incidental data, for example a staff member’s next of kin, will be deleted within three months of employment coming to an end.

Global data

We keep an overall summary of our work and the people with have reached through our services. This information might include numbers of people we’ve worked with, how many sessions we held with them, the outcomes we achieved, and could include some additional categorisation such as gender, age and other special characteristics. This data is anonymised and does not allow us to identify individual clients.

Information sharing

If we share information with the other agencies around safeguarding concerns, they will keep a record of that information in accordance with their own Safeguarding policies. We will keep our copies of that information while for two years after the final contact with the individuals concerned, after which point it will be securely destroyed. We may keep this information for longer if required to do so, for example by a commissioning body. This is always explained and separate informed consent obtained at the beginning of interventions that are commissioned by an external body.

When working with external commissioning bodies, we always have information sharing protocols in place.

The collection of this information will benefit our services by:

• Helping us to design our services to address need
• Ensuring we focus on continual improvement in the services we provide to clients and schools
• Ensuring we train and support our staff in the areas that matter
• Tailoring our resources to the issues that matter most to our community

How we will contact you

We will need to contact our clients, our schools and our supporters for a range of reasons. We will only contact our clients or any stakeholders on relevant Malachi business. We will use the contact details provided to us by clients as our main source of communication.

Our preferred means of communicating with clients is by telephone and email. We take all due care when sending information out, to ensure that it is only seen by the intended recipients, as detailed in our Data Protection Policy.

Our customers and business contacts

Malachi values the strong professional relationships we have with partner organisations, and the knowledge sharing that these professional networks bring. We will never trade or sell organisational data, and we will ensure that professional contacts are only used in a professional manner by our staff. Malachi workers will treat the personal data of customers, colleagues and contacts with the same respect and confidentiality they have for client data.

Seeing the information we hold about you

You can ask to see a copy of all the information we hold about you. To do this, you can write to us or email us at enquiry@malachi.org.uk

Since the work we do with clients is based on consent, you can withdraw that consent at any time. If you do, then we will delete the majority of the data we hold about you, retaining only the minimum information we need for our records and for our internal administration.

If an individual is not happy with the way their data is used, or if they think that they have suffered hardship or detriment as a result of how we have used or stored data, a complaint can be made to the Information Commissioners Office.