How we use your information
Aberdeen City Council collects and maintains information about you and your child for the purposes of processing, assessing your application for school transport and for providing any resulting transport service.
Occasionally additional information may be required to assess your application from your family doctor or school medical staff member. In some cases, your address may be shared with a qualified road safety practitioner so a safe walking assessment can be undertaken. If your child is provided with a transport service information will be shared with our contracted transport providers for the purpose of providing the transport service.
In some circumstances we will use automated decision making to speed up the time it takes to deal with some simple school transport processes. We currently use automated decision making in the following situations:
- Online mainstream applications for where the child lives outside of the mileage requirements
- Online applications for College Applicants where the child lives outside of the of the mileage requirements and is a late leaver of school, joining college.
We also use automated processes to provide information for the Education Authority to make an assessment of:
- Online applications in cases of exceptional circumstances
- Online applications for children with Additional Support Needs.
We have more detailed privacy information about how automated decision-making works in these processes. Please read our frequently asked questions. We will always tell you if a decision has been made about you solely on the basis of automated processing, and you will always be able ask us to reconsider this automated decision if you don’t think it is right.
Your data will be stored on secure servers within the EEA by our suppliers Firmstep Ltd and on servers maintained by Aberdeen City Council in our local data centre with BrightSolid.
How long we keep your information for
We will keep your information for as long as the service is being provided and for 12 months after the last provision of service. We will keep anonymised data beyond this period for the purposes of auditing service provision and quality assurance.
Your rights
You have rights to your data, including the right to ask for a copy of it. See more information about the rights you have, how they work in practice, and the contact details of our Data Protection Officer. You also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office. They are the body responsible for making sure organisations like the Council handle your data lawfully.
Our legal basis
Aberdeen City Council is the Data Controller for the information you provide. Wherever the Council processes personal data, we need to make sure we have a legal basis for doing so in data protection law. The Council considers the provision of school transport as part of its public task under the Education (Scotland) Act 1980 and Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act (2004). This means we understand our legal basis for processing your data as Article 6(1)(e) of the General Data Protection Regulation.
In administering this task, we are also likely to process special categories of personal data. The Council understands out legal basis for doing so as Article 9(2)(g) of the General Data Protection Regulation, because processing is necessary for the reasons of substantial public interest.