Children and young people's privacy notice

Spurgeons is a children’s charity that helps and supports children, young people and their families. Spurgeons actually first came about in 1867. Learn more about our history 

If you want to know more about the personal information we have of yours, or if you want to ask question, then get in touch. If you are under 13 your parent or carer would need to do this. If you are over 13 then you can write to the person who looks after all things data protection. You can send an email to dpo@spurgeons.org.

What we mean is any information that could be used to identify you. At its simplest, this could be just your name and address; or, it could include a telephone number, email address, a picture or recording of you.

If we are supporting you, there are things our staff would need to know to help them do that. This could be quite sensitive and personal and we may need to understand about what has happened and how things have been.

Pretty straight forward - we get it from you! If you are under 13 then your parent or carer has to give it to us on your behalf. If you are being supported by us then we might obtain information from, for example, a social worker, who may have suggested you come to us for some additional support. It’s important we have this information so we can support you the best we can. Depending on your circumstances and the nature of the support we are providing, there may be times when we will need to ask you if it’s okay for us to get the information we need.

So:

You might need a little bit of help yourself and maybe someone has contacted us for you, such as a social worker for example.

You might want to get in touch with us to help raise money to help others

When you do get in touch with us, we may sometimes ask you for personal information. Personal information means things like your name, your age, where you live and how we can contact you.

The first thing we would want to know and check, is how old you are. If you are under 13 then we will have to ask a parent or carer, or another adult who looks after you, to give us that information for you. We tell the adults how we keep that information safe in another ‘Privacy Notice’ that is much longer than this one!

If your age is between 13-18 then you can give us permission (or, ‘consent’) to record some data about you depending on what we are doing and hold on to it for as long as we need to.

If you are getting support then our staff they will sit down with you and explain all of this and check that you agree, ensuring you know what your rights are, and that you understand what we do with your personal information – hey, it’s your information!

So, if you are raising money then you might want to get emails from us about fundraising events, or you might want to do something to raise money. We’d need to keep in touch with you about that. If you decide you don’t want to get emails from us that’s absolutely fine, simply email us at dpo@spurgeons.org

It’s important for us to make sure you know that your information is looked after very carefully

Staff that will support you have been trained to look after your data and also to keep you safe. We won’t share any of your information unless you tell us we can – unless we are really worried about you. If we are worried about you, we may need to share some of the information we hold about you to teams outside Spurgeons who can give you a little extra support.

There are many factors to how long we keep your personal data. We believe it is only as long what is ‘reasonable,’ or where there is a legal requirement to keep it. We do have a document that says how long we keep all information and what we do with it – such as delete it or archive it.

You have all the same ‘rights’ with regard to your personal information as adults do – which is great. Explore the 12 rights.

You might be receiving a service from us in which case we would collect your data as part of receiving that service. This might include quite sensitive information relating to the support we are providing to you. If you are under 13, we will need to get consent from the relevant adults to hold your personal information.

Sometimes another agency (like a school, or your local authority) might have information that they want to pass onto us. If they do, it will be because they believe we can help.

As with many of our notices, from time to time we may need to tweak them if things change. The most important thing for us is to make sure they make sense to you.

If you have any questions about this notice, please do email us at dpo@spurgeons.org