Lancashire Inclusion Service (SEND)

To comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), where personal data relating to a data subject is collected, Lancashire County Council would like to provide you with the following details.

Contact details of this Lancashire County Council service:

Note that for queries intended for this specific service, do not contact the Data Protection Officer (DPO) mailbox, instead please direct your query to the following point of contact:

Inclusion@lancashire.gov.uk

Reasons for processing your personal data

Lancashire Inclusion Service is responsible for:

carrying out statutory duties, policies and procedures relating to Part 3 of the Children and Families Act 2014 and associated regulations that relates to children and young people with special educational needs (SEN) and disabled children and young people.
social work duties under the Children and Families Act 2014 and associated regulations that relate to children with disabilities.
the provision of educational psychology services.
the provision of specialist teaching services that includes Portage, support in the early years and for children and young people with sensory impairment and a traded service.
Carrying out the Education Health Care Plan (EHCP) Audit Programme with internal and external partners

We require information about you to help us to:

deliver services to support you/your child.
enable co-ordinated working with other teams and organisations.
carry out statutory duties for which we are responsible.
assess your/your child's needs to identify appropriate provision and specialist equipment
manage those services we provide you/your child.
help investigate any concerns or complaints you have about the support we provide.
evaluate the quality of services.
complete statistical returns to government departments.

We are required to pass on some information to the Department for Education (DfE) who use it to help with their policy development, performance management and funding, and to assist with the development of good practice.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies

We are increasingly utilising AI technologies to process your personal data. This is primarily utilised within Lancashire County Council using Microsoft Copilot Web and Microsoft Copilot 365. Please consult our Artificial Intelligence privacy notice for more details of how we use these specific platforms.

We do not use AI to make automated decisions. There is always a human intervention to review and approve any outputs from the AI tools. Decisions are not made solely by automated means.

Within the Inclusion Service, AI technologies are used in a limited and controlled way to support day‑to‑day casework, particularly in relation to Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs).

We may use approved tools such as Microsoft Copilot to assist staff with tasks such as summarising professional reports, organising information, and drafting sections of documents in a clear and consistent format. These tools help improve efficiency and allow staff to focus more on engagement with children, young people and families, and on professional judgement.

AI tools only process information that is already held within our secure systems and are used for administrative and drafting support purposes. They do not introduce new purposes for processing your personal data.

All outputs produced by AI are treated as draft content. They are always checked, edited and approved by trained professionals before being used. Staff remain fully responsible for the accuracy, quality and appropriateness of any information included in records or shared with you or partner organisations.

We apply strict controls when using AI, including limiting the amount of personal data used, ensuring access is restricted to authorised staff, and operating only within secure council‑approved systems. We also keep our use of AI under regular review to ensure it remains safe, lawful and proportionate.

AI is not used to assess needs, determine outcomes, or make decisions about services or provision. These decisions are made by professionals based on all available information and in line with our statutory duties.

Legal basis for processing personal data

The legal basis for processing your personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(a) Consent: you have given clear consent for us to process your personal data for a specific purpose.

(c) Legal Obligation: the processing is necessary for us to comply with the law. We will cite the applicable legislation if we need to rely on this basis for processing.

(e) Public Task: the processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law.

We will cite the applicable task/function and its' basis in law if we wish to rely on this basis for processing.

The following legislation represents the basis in law for carrying out this personal data processing activity.

Children and Families Act 2014, SEND Regulations 2014, SEN (Personal Budget) Regulations 2014 and the 0-25 SEN Code of Practice 2014.

The Service also provides statutory duties for children with disabilities linked to the Children Act 1989, Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, Breaks for Carers Regulations 2000 and the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990.

Legal basis for processing special categories of personal data

The legal basis for processing special categories of personal data relating to you, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(a) You have given explicit consent to the processing of your personal data.

(g) Processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest.

(h) Processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, for the assessment of the working capacity of an employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services.

The following legislation represents the basis in law for carrying out this personal data processing activity.

Children and Families Act 2014, SEND Regulations 2014, SEN (Personal Budget) Regulations 2014 and the 0-25 SEN Code of Practice 2014.

Legal basis for processing criminal offence data

We may process criminal offence data where this is necessary for the delivery of our statutory functions. In line with Article 10 UK GDPR and Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018, we only process such data where we have official authority to do so or where a relevant Schedule 1 condition, such as reasons of substantial public interest, applies. An Appropriate Policy Document is maintained where required to support this processing.

Information we process about you

While assessing SEND support and providing the most suitable educational provision, we collect the following personal information when you provide it to us.

Personal Data

name
address
contact details
date of birth
parent/carer name(s) and contact details
gender
NHS number
education information
health, social care or other services
your accommodation
reports relating to your situation e.g. safeguarding and other assessments
information such as from court/tribunal orders or judgments and professional involvement

Special category information

ethnicity
physical and/or mental health details
special educational needs
your medical history

Recipients of the personal data that we process about you

We may share personal data with:

internal departments, i.e. services/teams within LCC working to improve outcomes for children and young people.
schools, colleges and early years providers as well as wider education or training providers.

partner organisations where necessary, which may include NHS teams, health visitors, external providers of LCC Public Health services, midwives, district councils, housing providers, police, school nurses, doctors and mental health workers.
the First-tier Tribunal (Special Educational Needs and Disability).
the Department for Education.
a Court of Law.

other local authorities (education, social care or health provider and employment and other services).

Other organisations may pass information to us to help us carry out our statutory obligations and to ensure safeguarding of all children, including those who are not on roll of a school and receiving education via other means.

Any transfers to another country

Retention periods

Lancashire County Council will only store your information for as long as is legally required or in situations where there is no legal retention period they will follow established best practice.

File type	Description	Security	Retention period
Case files SEND	Information relating to the education, health and care needs assessments (EHCNA) and education, health and care plans (EHCP)	Retained on secure electronic system and then made inaccessible to system users and securely destroyed	Retention date is calculated to be the persons date of birth offset by 45 years.
SEND Tribunal case files	Information relating to a SENDIST which does not result in an EHCNA or EHCP	Retained on secure electronic system and then made inaccessible to system users and securely destroyed	Retention date is 10 years from case closure
Case files Education Psychology	Process involved in assessing and providing individual support for children and young people with special educational needs	Retained on secure electronic system and then made inaccessible to system users and securely destroyed	Retention date is calculated to be the persons date of birth offset by 45 years.
Educational Psychology information	Educational Psychology reports and written information which do not form part of the EHCNA/EHCP process	Retained on secure electronic system and then made inaccessible to system users and securely destroyed	Retention date is 6 years after the date of the last involvement
Specialist Teaching Service	School visit files	Retained on secure electronic system and then made inaccessible to system users and securely destroyed	Retention date is 10 years from case closure
Case files Specialist Teaching Service	Educational arrangements and specialist packages of support for children and young people with special educational needs and/or disability, children and young people disadvantaged by language or gender, or other special cases eg talented or gifted children or young people	Retained on secure electronic system and then made inaccessible to system users and securely destroyed	Retention date is calculated to be the persons date of birth offset by 45 years.

Your rights

You have certain rights under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), these are those rights:

to be informed via Privacy Notices such as this.
to withdraw your consent. If we are relying on your consent to process your data, then you can remove this at any point.
of access to any personal information the council holds about yourself. To request a copy of this information you must make a subject access request in writing. You are entitled to receive a copy of your personal data within 1 calendar month of our receipt of your subject access request. If your request is complex then we can extend this period by a further two months, if we need to do this, we will contact you. You can request a subject access request, either via a letter or via an email to Information Governance Team, address below.
of rectification, we must correct inaccurate or incomplete data within one month.
to erasure. You have the right to have your personal data erased and to prevent processing unless we have a legal obligation to process your personal information.
to restrict processing. You have the right to suppress processing. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.
to data portability. We can provide you with your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine readable form when asked.
to object. You can object to your personal data being used for profiling, direct marketing or research purposes.
in relation to automated decision making and profiling, to reduce the risk that a potentially damaging decision is taken without human intervention.

If you want to exercise any of these rights, then you can do so by contacting:

Information Governance Team
Lancashire County Council
PO Box 78
County Hall
Preston
PR1 8XJ

Email: dpo@lancashire.gov.uk

To ensure that we can deal with your request as efficiently as possible you will need to include your current name and address, proof of identity (a copy of your driving licence, passport or two different utility bills that display your name and address), as much detail as possible regarding your request so that we can identify any information we may hold about you, this may include your previous name and address, date of birth and what council service you were involved with.

Identity and contact details of the data controller

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Contact details of the data protection officer

Our Data Protection Officer is Joanne Winston. You can contact her at dpo@lancashire.gov.uk or Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Further information

For more information about how we use personal information see Lancashire County Council's full privacy notice.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the Information Governance team who will investigate the matter.

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ or email: dataprotection@lancashire.gov.uk

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).