GDPR & data sharing

[Datasharingquestions]

My AuDHD 16 y.o. attends FE college and also has an outreach mentor from an organisation which supports young people who struggle to cope with school/college. He is new to college after a lifetime of home ed and has an EHCP covering all the reasons why college is likely to be difficult for him (but the mentor hasn't seen it).

Can the outreach mentor legally share information related to low-level safeguarding issues with the college without parental knowledge or consent?

I'm aware they can legitimately share this info with the relevant authorities like social services or the police.

Yes, they can (and should) report safeguarding concerns to the college DSL and they can (and should) do this without parental consent if considered in the best interests of the child. The DSL within the college would be the keystone in coordinating responses to safeguarding concerns and working with other agencies to keep a young person safe. There's also no such thing as a "low level safeguarding concern" - any safeguarding concern raised must be treated seriously and appropriately by those professionals involved.

Thanks, that's helpful.

You may not know this, but is a teen saying that his views are "right wing" a legitimate safeguarding concern? This seems unreasonable. By right wing he meant "in an election, I would vote for Reform UK." I can't believe they would have been sharing safeguarding concerns if he had said "I'm left wing."

Simply saying "I'm right wing" isn't a safeguarding concern. There is, however, a duty to report extreme political views.

Do you know what your ds actually said? It sounds like he gave them reason to believe that he may have been radicalised, and I'm guessing that he probably said more than "I would vote Reform". Has he been watching extreme right wing content online?

Anyway, it is of course legal and entirely appropriate to share safeguarding concerns with the college's DSL. Whether there is a genuine safeguarding concern here or not is impossible to say as we don't know exactly what your ds may have said.

Thanks. He says he told his mentor, "I'm right wing - I like Nigel Farage and my dad likes Nigel Farage." The organisation has told us that him saying "I'm right wing" was one of the specific safeguarding concerns that caused them to contact the college.

Obviously we don't have any way of verifying what was actually said since only my DS and his mentor were present.

There's an important difference between them saying "He said he'd vote for Nigel Farage and that's the only specific safeguarding concern that caused us to contact the college" and "He said he'd vote for Nigel Farage and that was one of multiple specific safeguarding concerns that, taken as a totality, caused us to contact the college".

One of the specific safeguarding concerns?

What were the others?

Thanks. I still don't think that wanting to vote for Farage should be a safeguarding concern even amongst other issues. Would someone report a safeguarding concern about him wanting to vote Lib Dem or Labour amongst a group of other issues?

There may well be other issues at play, but they should be the cause for the safeguarding concerns, not his stated preference for a legal and mainstream political party.

The point is that voting for Reform wouldn't be reported as a safeguarding issue in isolation. But it might be relevant as part of a bigger picture if other concerns have also been identified.

He complains that people telling him what to do are acting like Hitler and Stalin. He has autism with demand avoidance (formally diagnosed) and doesn't cope at all well with people who tell him what to do.

This isn't a criminal prosecution or something that impacts negatively on your child. He's clearly, from your own description in your OP, vulnerable and at risk of grooming or other abuse. Things have been said that have raised concerns given your son's overall profile. It's right that those are shared so that it can be understood if your son is at risk from people who would exploit or abuse him.

Because he has the right to be safe, to access information about topics that interest him and join the communities he wants to join, without being at risk of bad actors working against him. And, because of his disabilities, he may need more support to do that.

Again, it's all about context.

If he had said "I want to vote for the Communist Party of Great Britain" then that, on its own, shouldn't trigger a safeguarding referral. If he'd said he wanted to vote for the Communist Party, had put up posters calling for an armed revolution, and was hanging around with people who had convictions for constructing explosive devices then that would be a different matter.

I think this is a helpful post. Far better that your son's mentor should be a little over zealous in reporting concerns (which may or may not be the case - we don't actually know exactly what was flagged) than that they should fail to adequately protect a vulnerable young man.

He went to a Reform party conference with his dad a couple of years ago, when he bought a mug and a t-shirt (which he no longer wears as he doesn't like Reform as much as he used to). He's had no other involvement in politics to my knowledge apart from annoying his family with long debates and corresponding with a Polish pen pal who is a socialist and thinks capitalism is fundamentally bad. No activism, no campaigning, no meetings or rallies or even talking to people online about it (we have really good parental monitoring on all devices). To the best of my knowledge, the only other Reform supporters he knows are his dad and his aunt (who he doesn't really have any relationship with and only sees a couple of times a year).

I have no problem at all with them raising safeguarding concerns about other issues but I really don't think that having Reform UK as your preferred political party is a safeguarding problem when it is literally just a case of intending to vote for them but no more.

@Datasharingquestions I think you might need to reframe your thinking a bit. Safeguarding isn't "problems", it's not a negative thing. As myself and other posters have said, safeguarding is about keeping your vulnerable child safe and sadly that includes from people who would seek to manipulate him to their own ends. Ultimately you don't have the full picture, neither does any individual professional who supports your son. And your son, who is the only person with the full lived experience, may not have the critical thinking skills yet to recognise insidious manipulation when it's happening to him. Not because he's disabled, but because he's young and still developing his own worldviews.

By sharing information, it's intended that a full picture can be built up, to understand if it is just who your son intends to vote for (which of course isn't a safeguarding concern) or if he's being manipulated and groomed to potentially commit a hate crime (which is).

Saying they are right wing or would vote Reform is not a safeguarding issue in itself but identifying with particular policies and attitudes or acting upon and sharing those with others may well be. Is he associating with others at college who might lead him on to more extremist views? Sharing information on safeguarding matters is not a breach of gdpr.

No, he was bullied by the few students he interacted with on the course he did at first (sexual harassment, not to do with politics). Then college moved him to another one, and none of the students on that course has even spoken to him. So I doubt very much it's been happening at college.

Thanks. I'm probably over-reacting because in the past we've had "safeguarding" reports and the threat of them weaponised as ways to attack me by family/"friends" who want us to stop attending to our DCs' needs and do what they want instead. The long-term negative consequences for my DC have been pretty bad, even though social care have never found any evidence of safeguarding problems and have always told us we're doing a good job.

In this instance, I think my DS is likely to want to stop seeing his mentor because he feels he can't safely discuss things without them shared with college behind his back. He hasn't been having the best college experience, which was why we organised the mentor in the first place. It would have been better if the mentor had contacted us first instead of passing it on to college and getting them to contact us. We don't have any influence over that though obviously.

Thanks to everyone for all the helpful replies.