Site menu

Adopters and Persons Applying to be Adopters

What is the Purpose of this Document? 

Norfolk County Council (the County Council) uses your personal information as an adoption agency to provide services to you.  'Use' means how the County Council processes, stores and shares information about you. 

As an adoption agency, the County Council is responsible for assessing and approving prospective adopters and providing ongoing support and guidance to adoptive families. The service also works to ensure that children are matched with the most suitable adoptive parents, with the aim of achieving the best possible outcomes for children and young people who have been in care. 

Further Details about Us and Your Rights

We provide the following details in our general privacy notice on our website: 

  • Who we are (and contact details) 
  • Your rights under the UK GDPR (including complaints) 

You can also ask us for a copy of these details. 

How We Use Your Information 

We use your personal information mainly to assess your application and to provide appropriate support and services throughout the adoption process. 

This includes: 

  • process adoptive parents' applications 
  • assess suitability to become an adoptive parent 
  • approve adopters for the County Council 
  • match approved adoptive parents with children for adoption, to ensure the most successful outcomes for children who have been in care, and 
  • provide ongoing support and advice to adoptive parents, including access to therapeutic and counselling services (where appropriate) 
  • To provide and deliver training and supervision sessions to social workers in line with Social Work England requirements. 

The County Council may also use your information to: 

  • prevent, detect, and investigate fraud 
  • monitor and assess the quality and effectiveness of our services 
  • support future service planning and commissioning 
  • evaluate and improve our policies, procedures, and service delivery 

We also use your information to review the quality of our services and improve how we work. 

We also use your information in other ways compatible with the above.   

What Information We Collect And Use About You

The information we collect and use includes: 

  • name 
  • address 
  • contact details 
  • date of birth 
  • gender 
  • preferred language 
  • information about your family network and relationships 
  • relevant background and historical information about your family 
  • educational history 
  • employment history 
  • financial information and circumstances 
  • legal information 
  • information gathered as part of assessments regarding your suitability to adopt 
  • details of any previous or current involvement with the County Council's Children's Services, including Social Care and Early Help 
  • references from third parties, including personal and employment references 

We also collect and use "special category" information about: 

  • racial or ethnic origin 
  • sex life 
  • sexual orientation 
  • religion or faith and, 
  • health data including any disabilities and medical conditions.  

By law we can only collect 'special category' information when it is relevant and for the purposes described above.  

We may also collect information concerning criminal convictions and offences. This would also include the fact that you have no convictions and offences. 

The UK GDPR makes sure we keep your special category and criminal conviction information safe and secure. More details are on our website in the document named 'Special category data and criminal offences data policy'. This explains how we follow these legal duties.  

Where We Get Your Information From

We receive most of this information from you, but we also receive it from: 

  • the local authority in whose area you live 
  • other County Council departments 
  • other adoption agencies (if previously involved) 
  • past and/or present employer 
  • social media 
  • previous partner  
  • adult children 
  • health bodies including GPs 
  • schools

Who We Share Your Information With 

We share your information with: 

  • departments within the County Council including Finance 
  • the Adoption Panel   
  • the judiciary and legal representatives 
  • Ofsted (in the event of a local authority inspection of children's services) 
  • other local authorities 
  • other adoption agencies 
  • third-party providers commissioned by the County Council to deliver services/provisions to you or its employees. 

We will share personal information with law enforcement or other authorities if required by law.

All information is shared on a need-to-know basis. We do not share more than we need to. 

We also share your information with companies that help us do our job. They also have to keep your information safe and only use it to help us. For example, this includes IT providers such as Microsoft. These service providers are known as data processors and have a legal obligation under UK GDPR and to the County Council to look after your personal information and only use it for providing that service.  In particular, the County Council has: 

  • entered into an arrangement with Link Maker. Link Maker provides a secure online platform for the sharing of profiles of prospective adopters for the purposes of matching prospective adopters and children national agency for matching For further details see the Link Maker's privacy policy: https://www.linkmaker.co.uk/pages/privacy_policy  
  • entered into a regional grouping of eight local authorities, two voluntary adoption agencies and Adoption UK known as Adopt East. Adopt East undertakes the following on behalf of the County Council as a data processor:  
    • matching of children and adopters (via Link Maker) 
    • the regional tracking of recruitment and assessment of persons applying to become adopters with the County Council  
    • the regional tracking of children's permanency planning  
    • identifying opportunities to follow up in relation to suitable potential adopters for children who may need an adoptive family. 
    • the analysis of detailed child and adopter level data to inform the approach to recruitment, sufficiency and matching, and for tracking and quality assurance purposes 
  • For further details see the Adopt East web site: https://www.adopteast.org.uk/   

We will not be routinely transferring your information to other countries outside of the European Economic Area but, if it is necessary to do so in order to provide a service to you or to safeguards others, we will ensure that appropriate safeguards are put in place before the information is transferred. 

Our Lawful Basis for Using Your Information

We have legal reasons under the UK GDPR to use your information because it is necessary performance of a task carried out in the public interest.

The tasks are carried out under the: 

  • Adoption and Children Act 2002 as supported by the Adoption and Care Planning (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2018 and statutory guidance 
  • Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 
  • Children Act 1989 
  • Children's and Social Work Act 2017 

We have legal reasons to use (including share) your special category information and criminal convictions information because it is necessary for reasons in the substantial public interest. The statutory functions are the same as the tasks in the public interest set out above. 

You are not required to provide your personal information. However, if you choose not to do so, we may not be able to offer advice and guidance or assess your application for adoption. 

We may also seek specific consent to use your information in certain ways. This will normally be where the use of the data is not necessary for the above purposes but may be very useful or helpful to us to provide services. 

How Long We Keep Your Information  

We keep your information securely in line with our retention policies, after which time it is archived or securely destroyed, unless we are required by legal reasons to retain records for longer than the stated retention period. 

If we need to use your information for research or reports, it will be anonymised, or pseudonimised, and any notes (handwritten or typed) from research sessions will be securely destroyed. The information will continue to be used in a summarised and anonymised or pseudonymised form in any published research reports or papers. If the published research is of historic interest it may be held in public archives indefinitely. 

How We Keep Your Information 

The information is stored electronically on secure shared drives, the County Council's case management systems (including Liquid Logic and Link Maker), and other secure platforms such as Microsoft applications. 

Automated Decision Making 

We do not use automated decisions about you and your family. 

Your responsibility to inform us of changes 

It is important that the personal information the County Council holds about you is accurate and current. 

Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.  You can do to help us with this by: 

  • notifying your social worker if any of your details change and 
  • informing your social worker if you believe any of the information we hold about you is incorrect 

Changes To This Notice 

We update this privacy notice from time to time, so please review it often. The date below is updated every time this privacy notice is updated. 

This privacy notice was updated June 2026 

Share this page