Last Updated February 2023
Sir George Monoux College is committed to protecting your privacy whether you study or work with us.
This Privacy Notice explains how we use information about you and how we protect your privacy. We receive funding from various funding bodies and may need to share information with them. Find out more information from the Education and Skills Funding Agency on how they handle your information and privacy.
We have a Data Protection Officer who ensures we respect your rights and follow the law. If you have any questions or concerns about how we look after your personal information, please contact the Data Protection Officer at dpo@sgmc.ac.uk
Contents
Do you know what personal information is?
Personal information can be anything that identifies and relates to a living person. This can include information that when put together with other information can then identify a person. For example, this could be your name and contact details.
Did you know that some of your personal information might be ‘special’?
Some information is ‘special’ and needs more protection due to its sensitivity. It’s often information you may not want widely known and is very personal to you. This is likely to include anything that can reveal your:
- race
- ethnic origin
- politics
- religion
- trade union membership
- genetics
- biometrics (where used for ID purposes)
- health
- sex life or
- sexual orientation.
Why do we need your personal information?
We may need to use some information about you to:
- deliver our courses to you
- manage and secure funding for the courses we deliver
- train and manage the staff who deliver those courses
- ensure the quality of our courses
- help with curriculum planning and new provision
- help investigate any queries or complaints you may have about our organisation or our services
- keep track of spending on services
How the law allows us to use your personal information
There are a number of legal reasons why we need to collect and use your personal information.
Generally, the three most common reasons for us collecting and processing your information will because:
- you, or your legal representative, have given consent
- you have entered into a contract with us
- it is necessary for employment purposes
In some circumstances, data may be shared with other organisations where:
- it is necessary to perform our statutory duties
- it is necessary to protect someone in an emergency
- it is required by law
- you have made your information publicly available
- it is necessary for legal cases
- it is to the benefit of society as a whole
If you have given us consent to use your personal information, you can also withdraw your consent if you no longer want us to process your information, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you want to withdraw your consent or for further information about this, please contact our Data Protection Officer.
We only use what we need!
We will only collect and use personal information that we need to deliver education, meet our service obligations, etc. We will not collect or use your information more than is necessary for what we do.
If we don’t need personal information for a particular purpose we’ll anonymise the information first before sharing with any other organisation. For example, when we analyse performance gaps for personal characteristics, such as gender or age, we will only use anonymised aggregated data before that information is shared.
If we use your personal information for research and analysis, we’ll always keep you anonymous or use a different name unless you’ve agreed that your personal information can be used for that research.
We won’t sell your personal information to anyone else.
Your Rights to your Personal Information with us
The law allows you a number of rights to the information we are holding about you. Your rights include…
- Right to be informed.
- Right to access your personal data.
- Right to ask us to move your personal data to another organisation.
- Right to erase your personal data (also called Right to be forgotten).
- Right to ask us to restrict processing your personal data.
- Right to object to processing your personal data.
- Right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling.
Who do we share your information with?
We work with a number of partners to deliver our courses, ranging from funding bodies, the local authority, the learner records service and student loans company. Where we have these arrangements there is always an agreement in place to make sure that the organisation complies with data protection law.
Sometimes we have a legal duty to provide personal information to other organisations. This is often because we need to give that data to courts, including:
- if the court orders that we provide the information; and
- if someone is taken into care under mental health law
We may also share your personal information when we feel there’s a good reason that’s more important than protecting your privacy. This is extremely rare, but we may share your information:
- in order to find and stop crime and fraud; or if there are serious risks to the public, our staff or to
- other professionals;
- to protect a child; or
- to protect adults who are thought to be at risk, for example if they are frail, confused or cannot understand what is happening to them
For all of these reasons the risk must be serious before we can override your right to privacy.
If we’re worried about your physical safety or feel we need to take action to protect you from being harmed in other ways, we’ll discuss this with you and, if possible, get your permission to tell others about your situation before doing so.
We may still share your information if we believe the risk to others is serious enough to do so.
There may also be rare occasions when the risk to others is so great that we need to share information straight away.
If this is the case, we’ll make sure that we record what information we share and our reasons for doing so. We’ll let you know what we’ve done and why if we think it is safe to do so.
How do we protect your information?
We’ll do what we can to make sure we hold records about you (on paper and electronically) in a secure way, and we’ll only make them available to those who have a right to see them. Examples of our security include:
- Pseudonymisation / anonymisation, meaning that we’ll use a different name so we can hide parts of your personal information from view. This means that someone could work on your information for us without ever knowing it was yours
- Controlling access to systems and networks allows us to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it
- Training for our staff allows us to make them aware of how to handle information and how and when to report when something goes wrong
- Regular testing of our technology and ways of working including keeping up to date on the latest security updates (commonly called patches)
Where in the world is your information?
The majority of personal information is stored on systems in the United Kingdom. But there are some occasions where your information may leave the United Kingdom either in order to get to another organisation or if it’s stored in a system inside or outside of the European Union.
We will never send or store your information to an unsafe location, we will also seek advice from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
How long do we keep your personal information?
There’s often a legal reason for keeping your personal information for a set period of time, this can be seen in our data protection policy.
If you have any worries or questions about how your personal information is handled please contact our Data Protection Officer.
Need some independent advise about your Personal Information?
If you need some independent advice or need to make a complaint about data protection, privacy or data sharing issues, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at:
Information Commissioner’s Office Wycliffe House Water Lane Wilmslow Cheshire SK9 5AFTel: 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 if you prefer to use a national rate number.
Alternatively, visit ico.org.uk or email casework@ico.org.uk.