Privacy Notice for Rebecca Fryer

This Privacy Notice was last reviewed in August 2025.

Your privacy is very important to me and you can be confident that your and your child’s personal information will be kept safe and secure and will only be used for the purpose it was given to me. I adhere to current data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (EU/2016/679) (the GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

This privacy notice tells you what I will do with your and your child’s personal information from the initial point of contact through to after your or your child’s therapy has ended, including:

• Why I am able to process your information and what purpose I am processing it for.

• Whether you have to provide it to me.

• How long I will store it for.

• Whether there are other recipients of your personal information.

• Whether I intend to transfer it to another country,

• Your data protection rights.

• Whether I do automated decision-making or profiling,

In this policy, ‘your child’ means the child you have parental responsibility for.

I am happy to chat through any questions you might have about my data protection policy and you can contact me via email: rebecca@creativerootscounselling.co.uk ‘Data controller’ is the term used to describe the person or organisation that collects and stores and has responsibility for people’s personal data. In this instance, the data controller is me. Rebecca Fryer. I am a Child Psychotherapeutic Counsellor providing counselling to children and young people aged 5-25 years old. I work under the name of Creative Roots Counselling. I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office Registration Number : ZB934418. My phone number is: 07968047880. My email address is: rebecca@creativerootscounselling.co.uk.

My lawful basis for holding and using your personal information

The GDPR states that I must have a lawful basis for processing your and your child’s personal data. There are different lawful bases depending on the stage at which I am processing your data. I have explained these below:

If you or your child have had therapy with me and it has now ended, I will use legitimate interest as my lawful basis for holding and using your personal information. If you or your child are currently having therapy or if you are in contact with me to consider therapy, I will process your personal data where it is necessary for the performance of our contract.

The GDPR also makes sure that I look after any sensitive personal information that you may disclose to me appropriately. This type of information is called ‘special category personal information’. The lawful basis for me processing any special categories of personal information is consent initially. I will then retain any counselling records in case of the need to reference them in the future (the official legal basis is to defend against potential legal claims).

What information will I hold?

When you contact me with an enquiry about my counselling services, I will collect information to help me satisfy your enquiry. This will include:

• your name and the names of any other parents/carers or guardians

• your address, phone number and email address

• your child’s name, date of birth (if your initial enquiry relates to your child) and their address if different from yours

• relevant life data for both you and your child which may help to inform the counselling treatment plan e.g. medical history, family set up, school history, bereavements or losses, personal and emotional challenges and any other information you may give me during the course of the initial meeting or subsequent work with your child.

• notes of each meeting with you and each client session, artwork produced in sessions and photographs of artwork or other images produced in sessions. No photographs will be taken of your child

Alternatively, your GP or other health professional may send me your details when making a referral or a parent or trusted individual may give me your details when making an enquiry on your behalf. If you decide not to proceed, I will ensure all your personal data is deleted within three months. If you would like me to delete this information sooner, just let me know. While you are accessing counselling. rest assured that everything you and your child discuss with me is confidential. That confidentiality will only be broken if I am worried that your child or another child is not safe. I will always try to speak to you about this first, unless there are safeguarding issues that prevent this.

Where will your personal information be stored?

I take the security of the data I hold about you very seriously and as such I take every effort to make sure it is kept secure, I will keep a record of your personal details to help the counselling services run smoothly, these details are kept securely on my computer which is accessed only by a PIN which is changed every 3 months and not shared with any third party.

I will keep written notes of each session. These are kept on my computer and are anonymized using client codes which are not identifiable. I will retain artwork produced during sessions for the duration of the counselling work. This artwork will be stored in a securely locked filing cabinet for the duration of the work. I will also take photographs of artwork or other images created during sessions. These photographs will be stored on my computer or my iPhone and in the clouds that these devices are backed up to.

For security reasons I do not retain text messages for more than four weeks. If there is relevant information contained in a text message I will record it on my computer in my written notes, Likewise, any email correspondence will be deleted after three months if it is not important. If necessary, I will keep a record of the contents of the email in my session notes. My computer is backed up to the Microsoft cloud storage system which is encrypted. My phone is backed up by iCloud which is also encrypted and accessed by password which is not shared with any third party.

After counselling has ended

Once counselling has ended your and your child’s contact details will be kept for six months from the end of our contact with each other. Notes and photographs from sessions will be kept for seven years from the end of the work and are then destroyed.

At the end of the work, your child will decide what they want to do with their artwork. Any artwork which they ask me to keep for them, will be kept securely in the filing cabinet for 7 years. After this it will be shredded and securely disposed of. The artwork will not be identifiable to your child. If you want me to delete your information sooner than this, please tell me.

Sharing personal data with third parties

There are times when it might be necessary for me to share your records with a third party. Due to the confidential nature of the counselling service, this is kept to an absolute minimum. However, I might need to share information with my supervisor who oversees my clinical work, or with my accountant. Your personal data is always anonymized and only shared if strictly necessary. In these cases, I have carefully selected which partners I work with. I take great care to ensure that I have a contract with the third party that states what they are allowed to do with the data I share with them. I ensure that they do not use your information in any way other than the task for which they have been contracted.

The only other time I might need to share information would be as part of a safeguarding concern or child protection issue or as part of a legal duty. In such cases, only the information strictly necessary to the safeguarding concern or legal duty would be passed on and wherever possible, I would notify you of this at the time.

Your rights

I try to be as open as I can be in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You have a right to ask me to delete your or your child’s personal information, to limit how I use that personal information, or to stop processing your personal information. You also have a right to ask for a copy of any information that I hold about you or your child and to object to the use of your personal data in some circumstances. You can read more about your rights at A guide to individual rights | ICO.

If I do hold information about you I will:

• give you a description of it and where it came from;

• tell you why I am holding it, tell you how long I will store your data and how I made this decision;

• tell you who it could be disclosed to;

• let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form.

You can also ask me at any time to correct any mistakes there may be in the personal information I hold about you. To make a request for any personal information I may hold about you, please put the request in writing addressing it to rebecca@creativeroots.counselling.co.uk.

Data security

If you have any complaints about how I handle your personal data please do not hesitate to get in touch with me by emailing the contact details given above. I would welcome any suggestions for improving my data protection procedures. If you want to make a formal complaint about the way I have processed your or your child’s personal information you can contact the ICO which is the statutory body that oversees data protection law in the UK. For more information go to How to make a data protection complaint to an organisation | ICO.

In the unlikely event of a data breach, I have a duty to inform you and the ICO within 72 hours of the breach occurring.

Children and young people’s consent

I work with children and young people. Guidelines regarding child and adolescent consent to personal data storage are complex and ever changing. I will keep you informed of any relevant changes to the legislation that may affect your child.

I will fully explain to your child in our first few sessions together that I will be keeping records of our work together – including their artwork- and I will explain in age-appropriate language that it is all kept safe and secure.