The National Kinship Care Advice Service is funded by the Scottish Government and delivered by Children First on its behalf.
The National 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.
For information processed as part of delivering the National Kinship Care Advice Service, the Scottish Ministers are the data controller and Children First processes information on their behalf. This means we have a contract with the Scottish Government to deliver this service.
Children First may also act as an independent controller where information is required for safeguarding, complaints, incident management, legal claims, information security or regulatory compliance. You do not need to determine which organisation is responsible before contacting us. Children First will manage all rights requests and liaise with the Scottish Government where required.
Whenever Children First uses your personal information, we must have a legal reason for doing so. Data protection law calls this a lawful basis.
For the Kinship Care Advice Service, our main lawful basis is public task. This means we use your personal information because it is necessary for us to deliver a service carried out in the public interest on behalf of the Scottish Government. This allows us to provide advice, information and support to kinship carers and others who contact the service.
In some situations, we may also need to use your personal information because we are required to do so by law. This is known as a legal obligation. For example, we may need to share information if a court order requires us to do so, or where we have legal safeguarding responsibilities.
Sometimes we need to collect and use more sensitive information about you, such as information about your health, wellbeing, family circumstances, racial or ethnic origin or other information that receives extra protection under data protection law. This is known as special category information.
When we use special category information, we must have both:
The conditions we may rely on include:
We will only collect and use the information that is necessary to provide the service, meet our legal responsibilities and support you effectively.
The information we collect will depend on your circumstances and how you contact us. We may collect:
We will only collect information that is relevant and necessary to provide the Kinship Care Advice Service, meet our legal responsibilities, safeguard children and families, improve our services and report on the delivery of the service to the Scottish Government.
Some information requires additional protection under data protection law. This may include information about physical or mental health, disability, ethnicity, religion or belief, trauma, wellbeing, family circumstances, care arrangements and safeguarding concerns. We only collect this information where it is necessary and lawful to do so.
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:
If you have worked alongside other Children First services, we may link your connection to the National Kinship Care Advice Service with the wider connection we hold for your family. This helps us provide you with the best possible support.
We only share information where there is a lawful reason to do so. We may share information with the Scottish Government for contract management and performance monitoring, although this will normally be anonymised or aggregated.
With your agreement, information may be shared with local authorities, schools, NHS services, advocacy services, legal advice providers and other organisations that can provide support.
We may also share information without consent where there are safeguarding concerns, risks of serious harm, legal obligations, court orders, law enforcement requests or regulatory requirements. We aim to share the minimum information necessary in each situation.
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:
The most common scenario will relate to child and adult protection. Protecting children is Children First’s primary purpose. If we believe that a child or adult may be at risk of significant harm, we may share information with relevant agencies, including social work services, Police Scotland or health services, where the law permits or requires this. This will not always happen with your consent. We will tell you about this unless telling you would place the child or adult at further risk of harm. Any decision to share information in these circumstances will be carefully considered and recorded.
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.
Children First takes information security and confidentiality seriously. We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information from unauthorised access, loss, misuse, alteration or disclosure.
These measures include secure IT systems, role-based access controls, encryption where appropriate, multi-factor authentication, staff training, cyber security monitoring and secure storage and disposal of records. We also have procedures for managing and investigating any suspected data breaches and regularly review our information security arrangements.
Where we use third-party suppliers to process information on our behalf, we carry out appropriate checks and require them to meet our information security and data protection standards through contractual agreements and other safeguards.
While no system can guarantee complete security, Children First is committed to maintaining robust safeguards and continually improving how we protect the information entrusted to us.
If you subscribe to our newsletters, updates or event information, we use Mailchimp, a service provided by Intuit, to send these communications on our behalf. Mailchimp processes your name and email address and provides information about email delivery and engagement, such as whether an email has been opened or a link has been clicked.
Mailchimp is used only for managing email communications and is not used to store records relating to support provided to children, young people, families or carers.
If you have any questions, please contact Children First support line: 08000 28 22 33.
