Privacy notice - Early Years Pupil Premium

North Somerset Council is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office for the purposes of processing personal data.  For full details of how we use personal data, please see the privacy section on the our website.

What is the Early Years Pupil Premium?

The Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) is a government funding initiative in England aimed at supporting improved outcomes for disadvantaged children who are in funded early years education. It provides extra funding to early years providers, such as nurseries and childminders, to help narrow the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers. The EYPP aims to ensure that all children, regardless of their background, have the best start in life and are well-prepared for school.

Key features of EYPP

Eligibility:

• Children from families receiving certain benefits (e.g. Income Support, Universal Credit with low earnings threshold)
• Children who have been in local authority care, adopted from care, or are under a special guardianship order

Funding:

• Providers receive additional funding per eligible child
• The funding is used to enhance the quality of early education, including professional development for staff, purchasing resources, or offering tailored interventions

Purpose:

• To support children’s development, particularly in areas like communication, language, and social-emotional skills
• To help providers deliver targeted support to improve school readiness

How it works:

• Providers allocate the funding based on the specific needs of the children, with the flexibility to design interventions that will have the greatest impact

Whilst the EYPP is managed as part of early years education, when children reach school age it is helpful for the admitting school to be told that a child is in receipt of EYPP. This is because there is likelihood that the child will also be eligible for free school meals and therefore be eligible for pupil premium which operates through primary and secondary education. This can trigger additional income to assist schools in providing additional services and targeted support to support disadvantaged pupils.

More information on Early Years Pupil Premium can be found on the GOV.UK website.

When you complete your placement forms with an early years provider such as a nursery or childminder, one of the forms that you are asked to complete is the parent declaration form. Some of the data collected in this form is collected by your early years provider on our behalf so that we can check whether your child is eligible for EYPP. For this information only, your early years care provider is acting as a data processor for us.

We process the information on the parent declaration form so that we can check whether your child is eligible for EYPP. As described previously, eligibility for EYPP triggers additional funding for your early years provider which we administer and distribute.

Eligibility for EYPP is an indicator that your child might be eligible for free school meals when it attends primary school. Receipt of free school meals will automatically entitle the school to claim pupil premium funding which it can use to provide additional and targeted services to your child.

Within the UK General Data Protection Regulation, we are permitted to process the personal information we gather.

This is because we are required to comply with a legal obligation placed on us by the School and Early Years Finance (England) Regulations 2023 in which the duties of a local authority in relation to EYPP are described. We are therefore allowed to process your personal information for the purposes of determining eligibility for EYPP under the provisions of Article 6(1)(c) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation.

The information that your early years provider collects on our behalf comprises:

• full name of child
• preferred name of child
• child date of birth
• gender
• ethnicity monitoring information
• full name of the child’s parent/carer
• address of family
• date of birth of the child’s parent or carer
• National Insurance number or National Asylum Support Service number
• parent or carer signature

All of this information is required to check on EYPP eligibility with the Department for Education.

We will share the information relating to EYPP eligibility with the following organisations:

• Department for Education which provides confirmation of eligibility for each child
• the school in which the child has been placed at the completion of the admissions process

We may share information about children eligible for EYPP with other council departments where this will enable those departments to target their resources to best effect.

We will otherwise only share your personal information with other agencies if we are required to do so by law for example where we are obliged to share information for the purposes of preventing and detecting fraud or where there is a safeguarding concern over a child.

None of the information covered by this privacy notice will be processed outside of the UK or EU.

We will retain the personal information described above for a period of six years following the end of the financial year in which eligibility is established. At this point your information will be irrevocably deleted from our systems. 

We do not make any automated decisions using the personal information covered in this privacy notice. All decisions arising from the information you provide will be subject to human involvement.

The UK General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act give you rights over your personal information that we process. The extent of the rights granted to you is determined by the reasons that the processing is deemed to be allowed. We have explained these reasons in the section 'Are we allowed to process your personal information?' The rights that are granted to you relating to the information covered by this privacy notice are:

The right to receive concise and transparent information

You have the right to receive ‘concise and transparent information’ about how we handle your personal data. We achieve this through the use of this privacy notice as well as other privacy information published on our website.

The right to access personal information we hold about you

You have the right of access to the personal information we hold about you, the reasons it is being processed, whether it is shared with other organisations, how long we hold it for, and whether there has been a security breach involving your personal data. To exercise this right you can make a subject access request on our website.

You do not have to make a subject access request in writing or through the website. You can make such a request verbally if you wish.

The right to request that we correct inaccurate data

You have the right to request that we correct any data we hold about you that is inaccurate.

The right to request us to restrict to extent of our data processing

You have the right to request us to restrict the extent of our data processing, for example if you believe that the information we hold about you is incorrect. You might also not want us to delete information as it approaches the end of its retention period. In these circumstances we are allowed to continue to store the information, but not use it for any other purpose.

If you wish to make a complaint about how we handle your personal data, we ask that you give our Data Protection Officer the opportunity to respond in the first instance, but you are not obliged to do this.  You can make your complaint directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dpo@n-somerset.gov.uk

The Information Commissioner is the designated regulator in the UK for all complaints relating the processing of personal information. If you are unhappy with the way we have managed your information you can seek more advice and raise a complaint via the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The ICO helpline can be contacted either via a webchat feature on their website or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.

Finally, you can also contact the ICO in writing at:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

This privacy notice is dated 11 December 2024.