Privacy notice for Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire

This privacy notice should be read in conjunction with the Children’s Social Care privacy notice.

The strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ) is a screening tool for emotional, behavioural and mental health wellbeing of children and young people in care, aged 4 to 16 years. In Achieving for Children, we use an online SDQ, and links to complete the questionnaire are shared securely with parents/carers and teachers before the health assessment and personal education plan (PEP) meetings. High SDQ scores suggest a high probability of suffering from a diagnosable mental health problem or emotional and behavioural difficulty that is significantly impacting on children and young people’s relationships or education.

Personal data we collect

No personally identifiable information will be collected or stored for the purpose of completing the online SDQ questionnaire. A child’s unique children social care number will be used to link a child to each questionnaire completed.

How we use your personal data

The main use of the SDQ data is to identify those children and young people with high SDQ scores and to provide them with appropriate emotional wellbeing and educational support.

Legal basis for processing your personal data

The legal basis we rely on for processing personal data is for the performance of a public task and to comply with a legal obligation. If we need to collect special category data, we rely upon reasons of substantial public interest.

How long your personal data will be kept

The information will be stored for one year.

Who we share your personal information with

The child’s social worker, the Virtual School, educational psychologist and clinician from the Emotional Health Service and NHS partners will have access to the SDQ results but only a needs to know basis.

Your rights and access to information

Under data protection legislation you have the right to request access to the information that we hold about you. Further details on exercising your rights are available here. If you have any questions or concerns about the way we process personal data, or would like to discuss anything in this privacy notice, please contact our Data Protection Officer: [email protected]

If you want 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 a complaint directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/