I would be grateful for any comments or advice or examples of policies colleagues may have for the following situation.
Our HEI runs a nursery for the children of students and staff. One set of information kept by the nursery is an Incident form which is completed when members of staff become aware of any information they think may help note any patterns of behaviour or any concerns staff may have from a child protection point of view. The information may be a remark from a child whilst in the nursery or information from a parent but as far as I can find out, the forms have only been used very sparingly if at all.
Nursery staff want to continue to have the option of processing this information but I am currently concerned that there seems to be no legal requirement to have or complete the forms and no real thought has gone into what use might be made of the information collected by way of the forms - e.g. keep it in case anything else is said, pass it to social services -, whether we can be sure of the validity of the comments / claims, how long the information will be kept and whether it should be disclosed in the event that a parent makes a Subject Access Request to the nursery - and I can see it happening in the case of estranged parents.
If anyone has any experience of such matters or can suggest where I can start looking for guidance on how to deal with this sort of information, I would appreciate your comments. I'm happy to take responses offline and post a conclusion for the list if that would help.
Thanks in advance for your help
Samantha Hill
University of Portsmouth
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