►Help4teens: Keeping your Personal Information Secure

Connexions Personal Advisers work with young people aged 13-19 in the One Point service which brings together services for children and families across County Durham. The Help4teens website supports the work of Connexions Personal Advisers by providing web based Information to help you make important decisions about your future.

Connexions Personal Advisers are trained and qualified to provide you with Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) to help you as you make positive decisions about your future. For example on: careers; educational choices; progression opportunities or personal development.

To ensure that you get the best information we are linked to a database which provides us with some basic details about you (your name and address and those of your parents). When you meet with a Connexions Personal Adviser they may collect additional information such as: date of birth; gender; ethnicity and your place of learning. They may write a plan for you to take away, this will remind you of what you have discussed. A copy of the plan, and the information we collect about you is stored in your file in a secure client record system.

If you contact us via the help4teens website we will either send you an e-mail response or if you need more in depth support we will refer you to see a Connexions Personal Adviser. We will use our secure client record system to record what we have done.

Your conversations with a Connexions Personal Adviser and contacts with Help4teens are confidential; we will only break your confidentiality if:

►you tell us something which makes us worried that you (or someone else) may be harmed; we will have to pass this information on to keep you (or the other person) safe.
►Your Connexions Personal Adviser and you agree that it would be useful if some specific information was shared with an external person for example to when you are applying for a college place or job. You would be asked for your consent to share this information and this would be recorded on your file.

All information held in the secure client record system is held in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998. If you have any questions or concerns about the information we hold on you, you have the right to see all the information in your record. If you would like to find out more about how to do this contact your Connexions Personal Adviser.

You can find out about the law governing Data Protection and Information Security on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.