Privacy Policy

Early Years is committed to maintaining high standards of privacy and data protection for our stakeholders and those we work with. This privacy notice lets you know what happens to any personal data that you give to us, or any that we may collect from or about you.

We have aimed to provide this information concisely and in clear language. It won't cover the full detail of each of our fair processing activities, but if you need further information or want this notice to be provided in an alternative format, please contact us

Please note that there is a separate Staff Privacy Policy for members of Early Years staff and job applicants.

Who we are
Personal data we collect
How we collect your personal data
How we use your personal data
What are the lawful bases for our processing of your personal data?
Sharing your personal data
Your rights under data protection laws
Data security and retention
Cookies and Analytics
Links to other websites
Changes to this privacy notice
Contact Us

Who we are

Early Years - the organisation for young children

6c Wildflower Way Apollo Road Boucher Road Belfast, BT12 6TA

T: +44 (0)28 9066 2825 E: dpl@early-years.org

Personal data we collect

The majority of our services and products are provided to settings, employees, volunteers, parents and their children in the Early Years sector. To provide efficient services and support, we collect and process personal data.

Information we collect from you

Parent and child information in connection with our services for children. This will include contact information, information about their participation in services and may include sensitive information such as medical information.
Business contact information such as your full name, email address, job title and the organisations that you are associated with.
Records of your registration and attendance at events, such as conferences, seminars, training sessions and formal meetings that we organise or host.
Records of your contact and activities with us, including emails, notes from phone calls and face-to-face meetings.
Records of cases we have provided support on matters such as Practice support, governance support, advice in connection with one of our services
Records of your subscriptions to email bulletin products such as member information including a log of whether you open the emails and clicked on links.
Photographs, video and/or sound recordings of events and training sessions for use in printed and electronic media, for promotional and archival purposes.
User account records for members or users of any of our services that require an account
if you apply for a job with Early Years we collect your personal contact details and employment history, as well as equality monitoring information and unspent criminal convictions (where applicable) in completing job applications and pre-employment checks. If your application is unsuccessful, we will delete your information after 12 months.

Information we collect about you from other sources

Standard internet log information such as your IP address and visitor behaviour patterns. See also: Cookies and Analytics

Survey responses for our own sector research surveys (and occasionally for event and training feedback we may use third party survey platforms. We will only use this information for the purposes of the survey and never share it with any third party except when agreed or in anonymised form. Each third party will have its own terms and conditions, and you can view their privacy policy on their site.

How we collect your personal data

We collect personal data from you:

When you register as a parent and register your child(ren) for any of our services
When you register to attend an event such as a conference or training session
When you register an account on our websites such as NICSS or Pathway Platforms
When you subscribe to email bulletin services
When you contact us for advice or support
When you contact us to apply for Early Years membership
When you sign up to become a member
When you visit our online shop
When you complete one of our surveys
When you apply for a job with us
When you sign up to our e-news

How we use your personal data

We use your personal information to:

Provide our services for children and families. Personal information is used to register children and families, inform families about services, keep children safe, track children’s progress
Manage registration and attendance at training and events, and to evaluate feedback afterwards
Provide digital products and services such as email bulletins and websites
Manage user accounts such as member accounts, service accounts eg NICSS and Pathway
Gather and analyse statistics around email opening and website traffic to help us improve our digital products
Maintain records of services, advice or support that our staff have provided to you

What are the lawful bases for our processing of your personal data?

We use the following lawful bases to process personal data:

Where you have given us your consent to collect your personal data and/or the personal data of your children. We will ensure that this is informed consent at the point of collection by providing further detailed information about how we use this specific personal information
Vital interest will be used for example for the holding of medical records of children where there could potentially be a danger to their wellbeing/life
Where it is in our legitimate interest to provide confirmations or updates about products or services we provide you with, such as fulfilling your request to attend events, participate in training courses, or help you with advice and support.
Where it is in our legitimate interest to provide our organisation membership service by keeping business contacts informed about membership services and sector updates, e-updates.
Where we have legal obligations under UK law, such as fraud prevention, the exercise of consumer right, equal opportunity responsibilities and safeguarding information.
Where we have a contract with you we will process data under Contract.
Where we are fulfilling a public task or acting under official authority.

Sharing your personal data

We do not share your information with any third parties for the purposes of direct marketing.

We may use data processors who are third parties who provide some services for us (for example, survey platforms, NICSS, Pathway). We have contracts in place with our data processors which limit the purpose of the personal data that has been shared with them

to providing the service and acting only on our instructions, and they are bound to confidentiality in doing so.

In some circumstances we may have a legal obligation to share information for law enforcement purposes, such as safeguarding obligations, to cooperate with investigations or in line with a court order.

We also share personal data with other people or organisations in the following circumstances:

To act as a representative membership body we may from time to time share limited personal information (name, organisation, job role and email address) about you in your role as a representative, specialist or policy officer to other organisations such as government bodies, media contacts or other community and voluntary sector groups. We do this where we determine that it is within our legitimate interests and of benefit to you in your professional capacity, and the impact on your privacy is limited. In other circumstances we will seek your consent before doing this.
To run events in partnership with other organisations we may share limited personal information from your event registration including name, organisation, job role and email address with the event partners. We do this where we determine it is within our legitimate interest to facilitate the event.
In any other case where we have obtained your consent in order to share your information with named third parties.

Your rights under data protection laws

The General Data Protection Regulation provides the following rights to you:

The right to be informed about the processing of your personal information
The right to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal information completed
The right to object to processing of your personal information
The right to restrict processing of your personal information
The right to have your personal information erased (the “right to be forgotten”)
The right to request access to your personal information and to obtain information about how we process it
The right to move, copy or transfer your personal information (“data portability”)
Rights in relation to automated decision-making which has a legal effect or otherwise significantly affects you

We are committed to upholding your rights. You can contact us for further clarification or any concerns you have regarding your personal data that we hold by contacting the Data Protection Lead using the details below. Please note that the exercise of your rights is dependent on the lawful basis that has been used for each processing activity.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office which enforces data protection laws: https://ico.org.uk/concerns

Data security and retention

We minimise the amount of personal data we keep about you and the period of time we hold it for.

In some cases, we retain records for the length of time that we are legally obliged to do so (for example, invoices, payment information, job application and monitoring information, minutes of general meetings and trustee decisions). In other cases, we apply our retention schedule when we no longer require personal data and ensure its secure deletion or disposal.

We make sure that we don’t collect more personal information than we need in order to carry out our activities and review our practices regularly.

When we use third party services and cloud services to process personal data we take due diligence to make sure that they are reputable and have appropriate data protection practices.

Cookies and Analytics

We collect information about your visits to our sites, including where available, your IP address, operating system and browser type. The data cannot be used to identify any individual. To help us gather this information we use cookies; small files stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies allow us to improve our site and deliver a better service.

Early Years website session cookie: A session cookie to store your session id, this cookie is unique to your visit and is required for logging into the site or using the support, comment and booking forms on the site.

If you do not wish to accept cookies you can activate the appropriate settings on your browser, however, you may be unable to access some parts of our sites. To find out more about cookies and how they can be turned off, visit www.aboutcookies.org. We will keep your information confidential except where disclosure is required and permitted by law.

Links to other websites

This privacy notice does not cover any websites linked to from within our website.

Changes to this privacy notice

We may change this privacy notice from time to time by updating this page to reflect changes in the law, the type of work we do, and our privacy practices. We will notify our members and other stakeholders of any meaningful changes to our privacy practice via our website, email, and other digital channels.

This privacy notice was last updated on 1st June 2026.

Summary of changes:

Full revision and updating of the Privacy Notice

Contact Us

You can contact our Data Protection Lead using one of the following channels:

Email: dpl@early-years.org
Post: Early Years, 6c Wildflower Way, Apollo Road, Boucher Road, Belfast, BT12 6TA