How we use your data
Aberdeen City Council collects and maintains information about you and your parent/carer for the purposes of assessing your application for an Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), for providing any resulting allowance and where necessary, recovery of the EMA. The information you provide will be used to update your contact details across the organisation.
EMA is a programme funded by the Scottish Government and administered by Aberdeen City Council. We provide information to the Scottish Government in accordance with the requirements in the Scottish Government EMA (Scotland) Business Model.
If you are happy with us doing so, we can use information you may have already given us about housing benefit and council tax reduction, to assess and award (if applicable) the EMA.
How long we keep your information for
Once your application has been decided, your application and related information will be kept by us for the current financial year plus 6 years. Incomplete or unsuccessful applications will be kept for 6 months from the date of application. 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 for the Council’s 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 properly.
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 in data protection law for doing so. The Council understands our legal basis for processing your data for the provision of education maintenance allowances as being part of our public task.
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 being necessary for the reasons of substantial public interest.