Outreach School Search
Privacy Notice and Data Protection Policy

At Outreach School Search (OSS) we take your privacy seriously and will only use your information to be able to deliver our services to you and your family. Under GDPR, our legal basis for processing the personal information relating to you and your family is so that we can fulfil our contract (or future contract) with you. Our lead person for data protection is Robin Laidlaw.

What information we use and where do we get it from:

We collect and process various types of personal information, including basic information such as name and contact details and information relevant to individual educational requirements.

Most of your information will have been provided by you directly, or a company working in partnership with you and OSS to improve our school search services to you.

When you contact us to arrange a school search for a member of your family or to seek alternative educational advice/guidance we will usually obtain the following details over the telephone or by email:

  • Your name and your partners name, if applicable.

  • Nationality of you and your partner, if relevant

  • Names and dates of birth of any relevant children

  • School(s) attended and curriculum studied

  • Details of languages spoken

  • Details of any relevant educational requirements, background information

  • Your current address

  • Email address of you and/or your partner

  • Telephone contact numbers for you and/or your partner

  • Any other details relevant to assist you with your specific assignment

At the start of each school search assignment we will ask you to complete our registration form with these details and we will ask your permission to contact you in the future to let you know of other relevant educational services provided by us which may be of interest to you.

Where you have children of varying school ages, we will retain your information and will seek your verbal permission to contact you in the future when our educational services may become relevant for other members of your family in the future.

Why do we collect the information and how do we use it?

We collect the information purely to help us provide educational services to your family now or, if appropriate, your growing family in the future.

Outreach School Search

How we store your information. How the information is secured.

We store information in two ways: on paper and on our secure database. All confidential paper information is stored in our archive strong-room. Information is also stored electronically on our password protected computers.

Sharing your information outside OSS.

We do not share your data with any third parties, other than:

  • Approved destination service providers and suppliers working in partnership with OSS to provide specialist assistance and facilitate the successful completion of your specific search assignment. All such third parties comply with the strict data protection regulations of the GDPR.

  • If we are required to by government bodies or law enforcement agencies

  • If we have your consent in exceptional circumstances (e.g if you would like us to speak to your child’s current or potential school).

  • Credit reference and fraud prevention agencies and law enforcement agencies or regulators.

Within the office team at OSS, we maintain confidentiality in the following ways:

  • We will only ever share information with a parent about their own child;

  • Information given to us by parents or schools will not be passed on to third parties without express permission unless there is a safeguarding issue (as covered in our safeguarding policy).

  • All OSS team members only discuss individual children for purposes of school research and visit planning.

  • All OSS team members are made aware of the importance of confidentiality during their induction process.

How long we keep your information:

We don’t keep your information for longer than we need to, which is usually up to six years after your relationship with OSS ends or until members of your family are no longer of school age. We find that many families return to us over the years e.g. with younger siblings or for help with curriculum changes or further relocation, so unless otherwise requested by you as a parent, we keep your contact details in our email database and will only be in touch if appropriate.

Should you wish to stop hearing from us, you can unsubscribe from our email database at any time and at that point we will also destroy any paper records and delete your information from our computer database.

Please note that some information is required to be kept for a certain length of time for statutory reasons, e.g. accounting records. Subject access requests (SAR)

You have a right to ask to see the data that we have about yourself or your family, and to ask for any errors to be corrected. We will respond to all such requests within one month. You can also ask for the data to be deleted, but note that:

  • If we continue to assist you with a further member of your family for a future school search there may be some delay while we re-gather all relevant information.

  • As mentioned above, even after your child has secured a school place we have a statutory duty to retain some types of data for specific periods of time.

Updated December 2022