Care leaver Subject Access Requests
SARs, or Subject Access Requests, are requests from an individual (you or someone on your behalf) to access information held by an organisation about an individual. The information that can be shared is decided by a law called UK GDPR and organisations are checked on by the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) to make sure they are following the rules. We have to follow this law when we complete SAR requests. If you are interested, more information can be found on the ICO website about the law.
One of the reasons SARs take so long – up to 3 months – is that an officer needs to read every page of information before we can share it with you. This can be thousands of pages that have to be read, line by line. As well as this, information that can’t be shared with you has to be redacted (blocked out) and this is done by the officer. Below is a rough guide of what information you can expect to receive in your SAR. Every person’s file is different so the information available is different from person to person but there are some common documents and information types.
What we keep
Information about you.
Information about you from professionals, records of any conversations or work you have completed with a professional, and discussions or decisions made that affect or affected you. Simply, if it is about you, and not anyone else, you will receive the information. There are some exceptions to this rule, the most relevant ones to you are covered in the ‘What we review’ or the ‘What we remove’ sections.
Things you might see
- Had a conversation with your social worker? That’ll be there!
- Notes from your children in care Review. The 6-monthly-ish meeting that lots of professionals attend to talk about how you are doing and what needs to be done.
- Your Chronology. This is kind of like a highlight reel of the really important events in your life and when they happened. You might not get everything – there are usually bits about other people in there as well – but most of it will be about you.
- Reports, assessments and/or plans. Social care has to write lots of reports, assessments and plans both before and after someone comes into care.
- Meeting notes. They also have lots of meetings, some of them will have longer notes (called minutes) and some will just be a short note saying what happened.
What we review
Family information
As we can only give you information about you, you will not get information about your parents, your siblings or any other relatives in a SAR. If you include names of family members we can keep them in the documents but you still will not get any personal information about them. We will keep in titles like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ and ‘sister’ but if you haven’t provided the name of that person their name will be redacted. If you have questions about your family, social care are able to support you with this and will want to help you understand your life story.
Information from foster carers/guardians/placements
Whilst you are in local authority care the adults in charge of your care (usually your foster carer or one of the workers in a care home) complete reports or updates about you. These are often done weekly but can be part of a running record (something that is updated as needed). Sometimes these reports have important information or talk about something that has happened, other times these reports only say ‘No issues’ or ‘Went to school as normal’. We remove reports without any meaningful information so you don’t have even more pages of information to read in a file which will already be very long. Anything, whether it be good or bad, small or large, that we think could be important or interesting to you (and that we are allowed to share with you) we do keep in.
School documents
Some information from school we do keep in, these are usually meeting or reports that social care were a part of or if school has contacted social care with some information.
Duplicate documents/information
With how information is saved on the computer system there is unfortunately a lot of duplication, this is where the same, or very similar, information is written lots of times. We do our best to remove what duplication we can so that you don’t need to read the same stuff again and again. Things people have said about you – This really depends on who has said it. Anything from professionals in the council, like social workers, will be kept as it’s a professional opinion. Anything from non-professionals, like family members, will be checked and anything we are allowed to share with you will be.
What we remove
This is a list of the most common things in a SAR that we will remove. As everyone’s history is different, the below details a rough idea of what would typically be removed.
Third party information
This is any information which comes from a different place than the council. As we don’t ‘own’ the information we don’t have permission to share it with you and you will need to go directly to them if you are interested.
Third Parties can include:
- NHS – Medical information
- Police
- Psychological reports
- Independent Social Worker reports
Court documents
Anything from the courts and any document written by social care for the courts must be requested directly from the courts yourself.
Financial information
Anything about money, grants, placement costs and similar belongs to us rather than you.
‘Admin’ information
This is information in your file which is for staff only; it’s there to update the records system that’s used, to help staff plan or to request help from other areas. An example of this would be a ‘Placement Information Record’, this is a form used when a child moves from one placement (like a foster carer) to another. Although it contains information about you its main purpose is to update your record so that addresses and contact details are correct.