The Kinship Care Advice Service for Scotland is run by Children First. Children First provides practical, emotional and specialist financial support to enhance the lives of kinship care families across Scotland and plays a key role in influencing policy. Through our support line, which is open seven days a week, we provide expert advice to kinship carers and their families. Kinship care families will be able to access individual support for children and young people, family support, group-based peer support and financial wellbeing advice including managing debt, energy bills and benefits.

Children First support line has a responsibility to keep all your personal information safe.

This page explains how we look after your personal information when you call, online message, text, or contact us.

Children First support line is committed to making sure your personal information is protected when we work alongside you.

Do you need to give Children First support line any personal information about you or anyone else?

It depends. If you would like to remain anonymous then you do not need to tell us your name or any other information that may be used to identify you.

If you are looking for kinship support, we will need some information from you. We will only store as much information as we need to give you the best possible support

What is personal information?

Personal information is anything that can identify you in some way. It can include lots of things, like your name, your address, your date of birth and even a photo of you. It also includes your health, your sexuality, your telephone number and can include things you’ve told a call taker about yourself and the reason you called Children First support line.

If you use Children First support line we may collect the following information about you:

• Basic contact details, including your name, email address, postal address, telephone or mobile number and date of birth
• IP address
• Any information you provide us with whilst calling, emailing, texting or using our web chat service.

Some of your personal information is known as special category data and needs more protection. Children First support line will only collect this special information if there is a need for us to do so. Often, we will only collect this type of personal data because you have told us during a call or webchat. We may collect the following special category information:

• Information about your health or your child’s health
• Your ethnicity, religion or cultural background.

What does Children First support line use your personal information for?

Children First support line needs to use your personal information to make sure we can support you in the best way possible. We might use your information in the following ways:

• Taking notes of our conversations over the phone, messages to Children First support line or your messages on webchat.
• Looking back at your notes when you contact us again to make sure we can give you the best support.
• Looking back at your notes as part of our commitment to quality and making sure that our call takers are providing the best support possible.
• Understanding key issues that affect parents across Scotland.
• Sharing your information with other people if you ask us to or we need too.
• If we use your information to look at the types of things callers talk to us about, to improve Children First support line, this will be done anonymously so your identity will be kept hidden.

What if you have worked alongside other Children First services?

If you have worked alongside other Children First services, we will link your support line connection to the wider connection we hold for your family. This helps us provide you with the best possible support.

What is Children First support line’s reasons for using your personal information?

Whenever Children First support line uses any personal information, we must have a legal reason for doing this. This is known in data protection law as a ‘lawful basis.’ The legal reason we rely on is called ‘public task’. This means that we will use your personal information to make sure we keep you safe and support you in the best way we can.

We may also use your personal information because a law tells us that we must (for example, a court officially ordered us to do so). This is called ‘legal obligation’.

For the ‘special’ information that we collect, we must have another legal reason as well as ‘public task’, or ‘legal obligation’. It is called a ‘condition’. If we don’t have another reason, or condition, we will not collect this special information from you.

These conditions are:

• Where you have told us we can collect this information (consent)
• Where we need to protect yours or someone else’s life (vital interest)
• Where you have made the information public
• For health or social care reasons.

How long does Children First support line keep my information?

Normally we will retain your information for five years but if there is a child or adult protection concern or a child you speak to us about is looked after we will keep that information for longer as the current legislation tells us that we must keep your information for this long.

Once your information has reached the end of its retention period your record will be anonymised.

Web chat

Children First support line uses Call Handling as our web chat partner.

Confidentiality and sharing your information with other people or organisations

Whenever and however, you contact Children First support line it is confidential. This means that we will not routinely tell anyone outside of Children First support line. However, it is important that you know that there are times where we will need to tell someone, but these are only in specific circumstances.
These specific circumstances are:

• Where you ask us to
• Where we believe your life or someone else’s life is in danger
• Where you tell us that you, or someone you know, has seriously harmed or are seriously harming another person
• Where there is a child protection concern
• Where we are told we have to by law (e.g. for a court case).

Children First support line will not make this decision lightly and senior managers will be consulted before we contact an external organisation to pass on information.

Questions

If you have any questions, please contact Children First support line: 08000 28 22 33.