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Privacy Policy

Halesowen College Privacy Statement – Notice about how we use your personal information (students)

We are the data controller of personal information about you.

We are: Halesowen College.

Our address is: Halesowen College, Whittingham Road, Halesowen, West Midlands, B63 3NA.

Our Data Protection Officer is Mark Garrett. If you have any questions about this policy or the ways in which we use your personal information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at Halesowen College, Whittingham Road, Halesowen B63 3NA.

Email: mgarrett@halesowen.ac.uk

Telephone: 0121 602 7777.

This privacy notice has been prepared in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (“GDPR”) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

1.1 The information that you give us

As part of your admission to the College we may collect your personal details including: name, address, date of birth, email address, work assessment data, dates of attendance, exam/test results, religion, ethnicity, former school, health information, behaviour record, sex-related information, genetic data, funding information, bank details and special needs details.

1.2 The uses made of your personal information

We will use your information to manage and administer your education. This will include putting together class lists, for sending event invitations, for communicating with you, for dealing with admissions, for putting together reports and registers, to check entrance exam results, to allocate you to the correct classes for assessments, to make arrangements for exams or visits, to consider whether to offer places to students, to consider whether special provision or assistance is required for exams and visits and to be able to tell other colleges your attendance dates if you leave.

1.3 The legal basis on which we collect and use your personal information.

Generally, the information is processed as part of our public interest task of providing education to you. Where that information is special category personal information (e.g. medical information) we will process it because there is a substantial public interest for us to do so.

1.4 How long we keep your personal information.

Halesowen College will hold your personal data as outlined above for the duration of your course and 6 years thereafter.

1.5 How we share your personal information.

We may share the personal information that you give us with the following organisations (or types of organisation) for the following purposes.

Organisation / type of organisation: Statutory bodies such as funding agencies, exam boards and local authorities plus organisations that the College works in partnership with or alongside such as schools, universities, careers services and other educational providers. Data will also be sent to the Police and other agencies for the detection or prevention of crime purposes. Where debts are owed to the College your data may be shared with organisation to recover monies owed.

Purpose: We will share your data with the organisations listed above to provide support during your studies and enable you to complete your qualification and progress to a further course of study and/or sustainable employment. We may also share your personal information with third parties who provide services to the College.

Organisation / type of organisation: Specialised support organisations, external educational consultants and similar organisations

Service: To provide designated support for individuals.

1.6 How we transfer your personal information outside Europe.

We do not store or transfer your personal data outside Europe.

1.7 Will we monitor your use of the College’s computers?

We keep an eye on how you use the College’s equipment and computers and what websites you go on when you are browsing the internet at College. This is because we have legal obligations to protect you, and we also have a legitimate interest in making sure you are using our computer equipment correctly and that you are not looking at any inappropriate content.

If you want to browse the internet privately, you will need to use your own devices which are not linked to the College’s network or internet connection.

1.8 Your rights over your personal

You have a number of rights over your personal information, which are:

The right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are unhappy about the way your personal data is being used – please refer to the ICO’s website for further information about this (https://ico.org.uk/);
The right to ask us what personal information about you we are holding and to have access to a copy of your personal information;
The right to ask us to correct any errors in your personal information;
The right, in certain circumstances such as where our use of your personal information is based on your consent and we have no other legal basis to use your personal information, to ask us to delete your personal information;
The right, in certain circumstances such as where we no longer need your personal information, to request that we restrict the use that we are making of your personal information;
The right, in certain circumstances, to ask us to review and explain our legitimate interests to you; and
The right, where our use of your personal information is carried out for the purposes of an agreement with us and is carried out by automated means, to ask us to provide you with a copy of your personal information in a structured, commonly-used, machine-readable format.

1.9 Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. Any changes we make to our privacy policy in the future will be notified to you by email.

Department for Education Privacy notice for Key Stage 5 and adult education

For the purposes of relevant data protection legislation, the DfE is the data controller for personal data that we provide to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). Below is a copy of their privacy notice as of 20/06/2022. They may change this from time to time and we encourage you to check their website from time to time.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/privacy-notice-for-key-stage-5-and-adult-education/privacy-notice-for-key-stage-5-and-adult-education

This privacy notice explains how the Department for Education (DfE) uses (processes) any personal data you give to us, or any that we may collect about you in relation to Key Stage 5 and adult education.

Key Stage 5 and adult education includes learners that stay in full-time education in schools, sixth-forth colleges, further education colleges or University Technical College; or learners that start an apprenticeship or traineeship.

For the purposes of relevant data protection legislation, the DfE is the data controller for personal data, this includes personal data processed by Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA).

If you would like:

More information about how we process your personal data or your data protection rights
To make a request about your information – for example to request a copy of your information or to ask for your information to be changed
To contact our Data Protection Officer

You can contact us in the following ways:

Using our secure contact form
or in writing to:

Data Protection Officer
Department for Education (B2.28)
7 & 8 Wellington Place
Wellington Street
Leeds
LS1 4AW

The kinds of personal data we process about you

When we ask you for personal data, we will:

Tell you the reasons we’re asking for it
Only ask for the information we need
Make sure we don’t keep it for longer than necessary
Protect it and make sure only the appropriate people have access to it
Let you know if we’ll share it with other organisations
Keep it up to date where necessary
Consider privacy risks when we’re planning to change the way we use or hold it
Train our staff to ensure we use and protect it properly

In return, we ask you to:

Give us accurate information
Tell us as soon as possible if there are any changes

We may process the following types of personal data about you:

Your personal contact details
Your date of birth
Your nationality and ethnicity
Equality, diversity and inclusion information
Information about your career, workplace, employer
Data and information about your learning, including courses and qualifications you are taking or have taken

We may also process images and recordings for the purposes of engaging and communicating with the general public. This is done in accordance with codes of practice and guidelines laid down by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

More information about how the DfE handles personal data is available.

How and why we get personal information

We collect your personal data where the law allows, or we have a legal duty to do so. We may also receive your personal data from third parties including other government departments. Your personal data is collected to enable us to carry out our functions.

The lawful basis we often rely on for processing your personal data is to perform our public task. We may also rely on the following lawful bases:

Your consent – where this is relied upon, you can ask to remove your consent at any time – you can do this by using our contact form
A contractual obligation
A legal obligation
To protect a person’s vital interest
Legitimate interest

Personal data collected from you directly

We may collect information from you:

Face to face like when you fill in a form or survey at our careers fairs.
Over the telephone like when you contact our helpdesks
In correspondence that you send to us, like emails, letters and social media posts

We may use personal data we collect directly from you to:

Send you information about our work
Improve the services we offer to you
Operate our complaints policy
Contact you for feedback on services we provide to you
Ensure the protection of public funds
Prevent and detect fraud

Personal data about learners and apprentices

We collect personal data about learners from you, and third parties, including other government departments and agencies and from organisations funded by DfE and ESFA to provide learning. We collect information about you and what you are studying.

This includes:

Information on enrolment and achievements which is collected from learning providers following their funding terms and conditions (learning providers include further education colleges and private training companies where you undertake learning)
Information about you and what you are studying is collected by the Individualised Learner Record (ILR) – see the ILR privacy notice for more details
Information from the Learning Records Service (LRS) to issue you with a Unique Learner Number (ULN), and to create and keep your Personal Learning Record – see the LRS privacy notice for more details
The National Careers Service – see the National Careers Service privacy notice for more details
The Bursary for Vulnerable Group Scheme which uses the information you give to your educational institution (for example. your college) to decide if you are eligible for a bursary under the scheme eligibility criteria
If you start an apprenticeship, your information is supplied to us by your employer – we collect information about you and what you are studying, see the manage apprenticeship service privacy notice and apprenticeship website privacy notice for more details

Information is collected from and shared by third parties so DfE and ESFA can deliver their obligations to safeguard children and young people.

Sharing your personal data

Third parties

We share your personal data with other parts of DfE and ESFA, and third parties, including other government departments, agencies, local authorities and organisations, where the law allows it or we have a legal duty to do this.

These organisations can include:

An organisation who is working for ESFA or DfE under contract
Organisations who provide:

Administration services
- Careers and other guidance
- Statistics and research about education, training, employment and well-being, this includes the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) so that you can take part in the graduate outcomes survey

Organisations that request information to help prevent and detect crime, including sharing personal information for law enforcement purposes to prevent fraud and to assist organisations involved in the prevention of fraud where it is necessary and proportionate

We may share your personal data with other organisations where:

We may share your personal data with other organisations where learning is funded by another public authority. This information is shared to help those organisations do their work. These include Department for Work and Pensions managing the European Social Fund, and combined authorities in city regions and the Greater London Authority managing devolved adult education budget funding.

We may also share your personal data with other organisations where a further education college or other training provider can no longer deliver your training funded by DfE or ESFA. This may be where a training provider has stopped trading. To help you continue learning, DfE will arrange to securely transfer your information from your last training provider to your next training provider or to DfE if your learning does not continue straight away. To do this:

The DfE and training providers share data to make sure information held about you and your funded learning is accurate
DfE and your training provider may need to share your information with another training provider (for example, to confirm a claim for funding from ESFA) and with an awarding organisation (for example, to confirm what stage your learning has reached)

We may also share your personal data with other organisations where DfE and ESFA are notified of an issue regarding safeguarding of children and young people.

Other people and organisations may also share personal data with DfE and ESFA, for example when they make a complaint or raise a concern with us. This can include information shared in accordance with the statutory guidance keeping children safe in education and working together to safeguard children. This information will be used to investigate complaints and to ensure trusts and academies comply with the regulations (Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014) and their funding agreement.

How long we will keep your personal data

We will only keep your personal data for as long as we need it. DfE has a disposal schedule for personal data based on the needs of the department and the law. We may need to keep some of your personal data for 66 years for research and producing statistics.

We will take the necessary steps to keep your information safe. It will then be securely destroyed when it is no longer needed.

If you want to know how long we keep your information, please write to DfE Departmental Records Officer using our secure contact form.

Storing personal data outside the UK

When DfE stores personal data outside the UK, we will make sure we comply with the data protection law and take additional steps to keep your personal data safe, which can include additional technical and security arrangements, contractual agreements and data sharing agreements.

West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) Privacy Notice

Adult Education Budget Privacy Notice for the Purpose of Data Collection

The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) is responsible for commissioning and funding adult education budget provision for learners within the West Midlands. The WMCA may use your personal information in our delivery of this work. For further information on how the WMCA use your data click here.

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

Your right of access – you have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information
Your right to rectification – you have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate, you also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete
Your right to erasure – you have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances
Your right to restriction of processing – you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
Your right to object to processing – you have the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
Your right to data portability – you have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request we have 1 month to respond to you.

How to make a subject access request

You have the right to ask for access to your personal information, known as a subject access request. See the DfE Personal Information Charter for further details

To make a subject access request you can use the DfE contact form.

Alternatively, you can make a subject access request in writing. Post your request to:

Data Protection Officer
Department for Education (B2.28)
7 & 8 Wellington Place
Wellington Street
Leeds
LS1 4AW

Include as much information as you can about what information you need and the years you need the information for. If possible tell us which part of the department holds the information. You’ll also need to tell us your telephone number and address.

We may need to check your identity and your right to access the information you’re requesting. This means we might ask for a copy of the identification pages of your passport or photo driving licence and proof of your current address.

We’ll try to respond to your request within 1 month. However, if your request is complex we may extend the period by a further 2 months, but we’ll tell you if this is the case.