Privacy notice - school transport

Who we are

We are a Local Authority established under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 and having its Headquarters at Scottish Borders Council, Newtown St Boswells, Melrose, TD6 0SA. You can contact our Passenger Transport School Transport Team by:

  • email: schtransport@scotborders.gov.uk 
  • phone: 01835 826558

Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted using the contact details above or by emailing dataprotection@scotborders.gov.uk

How we will use your information

The personal information we hold about you may be collected:

  • on a paper
  • online form
  • phone
  • email
  • by a member of our staff
  • by one of our partners

We will use your information for the administration and organisation of the most cost efficient school transport where an eligible application is received, and to ensure the operator of the school transport has collected the correct person to transport.

We are entitled to collect and use this information under its statutory duty to provide this service to you. We provide these services to you as part of our statutory duty to provide home to school transport. Without this information, we would be unable to undertake the administrative duties within this service, resulting in an impact to public funds and vital services.

Who we may share your information with

Your information will be accessed by our staff who need to do so in order to provide the service described above. Potential recipients include:

  • internally, where deemed necessary
  • we may share this information with our approved list of operators for the purpose of ensuring the transport request is fulfilled
  • where there is a requirement for translation and interpreting services we may share your data with any of the following as appropriate:
    • Language Line
    • Alpha Translating and Interpreting Services LTD
    • Scottish Borders Interpreter Agency
    • Contact Scotland – BSL
    • Royal Blind – Scottish Braille Press
  • our contracted external printers

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:

  • your consent, you are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by emailing schtransport@scotborders.gov.uk
  • we have a contractual obligation to ensure that the personal details and journey details are correct as requested

Your information may also be shared and analysed internally in order to provide management information, inform service delivery reform and similar purposes to meet our duty to achieve best value and continuous service improvement. 

In general we do not transfer personal data outside either the UK or the European Economic Area (EEA) and on the rare occasions when we do so we will inform you. We will only transfer data outside the UK and the EEA when it is satisfied that the party which will handle the data and the country it is processing it in will provide adequate safeguards for personal privacy.

Decision Making

We do not use automated decision-making processes. Some processes are semi-automated (such as anti-fraud data matching) but a human decision maker will always be involved before any decision is reached in relation to you.

Information you have given us about other people

If you have provided anyone else's details on this form, please make sure that you have told them that you have given their information to us. We will only use this information to contact those people to assess your own entitlement to this school transport service. If they want any more information on how we will use their data they can view our privacy statement or email dataprotection@scotborders.gov.uk

How long do we keep your information for?

We keep your personal details and the journey details for until the end of the financial year after the journey was made. We will then dispose of your personal information held out with our transport system by deleting the personal details items surrounding the journey that was made.

The transport team will determine the period we can retain your information held within our transport management information system for reporting and analysis reasons only.

Your data protection rights

You have the right to request access to any personal data held about you by us.

You can also request that we restrict the use of your information or even object to any further processing. You can do this by contacting our Data Protection Officer. We will respond to your request within 30 calendar days.

  • your right of access - you have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information
  • your right to rectification - you have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete
  • your right to erasure - you have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances
  • your right to restriction of processing - you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
  • your right to object to processing - you have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
  • your right to data portability - you have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at schtransport@scotborders.gov.uk if you wish to make a request.

For more information on your rights please see our website or alternatively if you would like a hard copy of this information, please contact us using the contact details provided above.

How to raise a complaint

We aim to directly resolve all complaints about how we handle personal information. If your complaint is about how we have handled your personal information, you can contact our Data Protection Officer by:

  •  email dataprotection@scotborders.gov.uk
  • phone: 0300 100 1800

However, you also have the right to lodge a complaint about data protection matters with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), who can be contacted by:

  • post: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
  • phone: 0303 123 1113
  • website

If your complaint is not about a data protection matter you can find details on how to make a complaint.