Introduction
The University’s Outreach Team engage in activities with schools and colleges to encourage students from underrepresented groups to enter Higher Education. We value your privacy and we recognise the need to process your personal data in a fair and lawful manner.
The University of Southampton is a "data controller". This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. You are being given a copy of this privacy notice because you have agreed to take part in our outreach activities. It makes you aware of how and why your personal data will be used and how long it will usually be kept for. It provides you with certain information that must be provided under the General Data Protection Regulation ( (EU) 2016/679) (GDPR). Our registration number with the Information Commissioner’s Office is Z6801020.
Here, personal data refers to the information that we hold about you from which either on its own or in combination with other information you can be identified and may include names, contact details, photographs, information about your educational background and identification numbers such as the HEAT ID which is assigned to every outreach participant on our database. A list of the data we collect is set out below.
"Processing" means doing anything with your personal data, such as collecting, recording or holding the data as well as disclosing, destroying or using the data in any way.
This notice may be amended from time to time and you can obtain a current version at: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/schools-colleges/privacynotice.page
Data Protection Principles
We will comply with data protection law and principles, which means that your personal data will be:
· Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
· Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
· Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
· Accurate and kept up to date.
· Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
· Kept securely.
What information does the University collect?
In connection with our outreach activities we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal data about you:
· Name;
· Gender;
· Contact information;
· Educational information including what school you are attending;
· Attitudes to Higher Education/ Level 4 learning;
· Knowledge of Further Education, Higher Education and Level 4 qualifications and options;
· Ethnicity;
· Medical information in regards to any disabilities;
· Thoughts on education, employment and what you would like to do in the future;
· Immediate family’s education;
· A record of our contact with you.
What if you do not provide your personal data?
If you fail to provide data when requested, you may not be able to enrol and participate in all of our outreach activities, for example ‘Access to Southampton’ and our residential programmes as these programmes require this information in order to assess eligibility and enable support to be put in place if required.
Why does the University process personal data?
We need to process your data in fulfilment of the University’s public task in providing outreach events and services. It may also be necessary for us to process your data for our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of others, in situations where we are confident that your interests will not be overridden, so we can ensure that outreach activities can be provided designed to inform and engage you.
In certain cases, we may obtain your consent before we process your personal data for specific activities. Where you have given us your consent, you can withdraw that consent at any stage. To withdraw your consent, please contact: outreach@soton.ac.uk and we will stop using this data and dispose of it securely.
Personal data processing activities in providing outreach events and services include, most notably, communicating with you about activities. We may also contact you to take part in surveys. Moreover, if you go on to apply to be a student at the University of Southampton, you may be identified as eligible for additional consideration of your application, a guarantee of interview, or a reduced offer through our contextual admissions policy (for details of this scheme, please see the Contextual Admissions page.
We will use the personal data we collect about you to enable you to:
· Take part in activities designed to inform and engage you in deciding your next steps in education;
· Take part in surveys to help us to evaluate the above activities;
· Be identified in the future as eligible for a contextual offer at the University of Southampton.
It enables us to:
· Identify you as a participant;
· Measure your participation in the activities outlined above;
· Monitor and evaluate the project;
· Measure engagement within groups that share certain underrepresented characteristics, for example gender or ethnicity;
· Track any changes in your attitudes towards higher education;
· Track any changes about how you feel about yourself in an education context e.g. self-confidence, decision making and identity;
· Track your progression into higher education and/or work;
· Identify whether you may be eligible for a contextual offer at the University of Southampton;
· Assess equality of opportunity;
· Carry out research including monitoring of the contextual admissions policy, and the success of outreach participants who go on to study at University of Southampton.
How the University uses your Special Category personal data
We may also collect, store and use the following “special categories” of more sensitive personal data where this is absolutely necessary to enable us to deliver our outreach activities. In particular, we will use personal data regarding any disability you may have, and regarding your ethnicity, in the following ways:
· We will use data about your disability status to consider whether we need to provide appropriate adjustments to enable you to take part in our activities.
· We will use data about your race or national or ethnic origin to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting, ensuring an evidence-led approach to the evaluation of our activities with underrepresented groups, as recommended by the Office for Students.
· We will always report special category data in aggregated form.
We will only process special categories data where you have given your explicit consent unless we are legally obliged to do so. Where you have given us your consent, you can withdraw that consent at any stage. To withdraw your consent, please contact: outreach@soton.ac.uk and we will stop using this data and dispose of it securely.
Processing for limited purposes
We will only process your data for the specific purpose or purposes that we tell you about, or if specifically permitted by the UK Data Protection Act 2018, and will only process your data to the extent necessary for that specific purpose or purposes.
Accuracy
We will keep the data we store about you accurate and up to date as relevant to the purpose or purposes for which we process it. Data that is inaccurate or out of date will be destroyed. Please notify us if your personal details change or if data we hold about you is inaccurate.
How will your personal data be collected?
We obtain your personal data either directly from you, or indirectly from third party sources with whom you have had direct contact. This may include your school, or an organisation such as Southampton Hub who has been working with you on our behalf.
How will your personal data be secured?
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you, and any applicable regulator, of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees of the University who have a business need-to-know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
Who has access to your personal data?
Your information will be shared internally within the University for the purposes of providing you with our outreach activities.
If you apply to be a student at the University of Southampton, and you meet the criteria of our contextual admissions policy, an additional flag will be held against your application record in the University’s student record system, Banner.
We will only share your data with third parties for limited purposes and in limited amounts where there is a legitimate reason for the University to do so. We make sure that anyone with whom we share your personal data with will only use it for the reasons we say and that they keep it secure.
For example, we will share your data with the Higher Education Access Tracking (HEAT) service, which is managed and led by the University of Kent. This is a not for profit service, which allows us to store our data, and facilitates monitoring, evaluation and research. The HEAT service links our outreach participant data with outcome data from other agencies, including the Department for Education, Skills Funding Agency and the Higher Education Statistics Agency, to explore in detail the relationship between outreach participation and student success. This helps us to meet our obligation to the Office for Students to carry out evidence-led, strategic evaluation as detailed in the University’s Access and Participation Plan, of which a current version can be found at: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/about/governance/access-agreement.page
We may pass your details to contracted third parties to allow for some market research activities to help improve our outreach activities. The purpose of this would be to gather feedback about your experience with the University. Any requests for feedback are voluntary and do not affect your relationship with the University. All third-party data recipients are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal data in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party data recipients to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
Very rarely we may need to disclose your data with someone else to protect or defend the University’s rights, interests, or property, or those of third parties; act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of yourself or the public; or protect against legal liability.
Holding and retaining your data
We will store your personal data securely for the durations detailed below:
· If you are aged 20 or under at the start of the academic year in which you attend your first outreach activity your data will be retained until your 30th birthday, or for 15 years after graduation (whichever is later).
· If you are aged 21 or over at the start of the academic year in which you attend your first outreach activity your data will be retained for 10 years, or for 15 years after graduation (whichever is later).
After this period, we will either securely destroy your personal data, or any directly identifiable link between you and your information will be removed so that we only retain core information necessary for reporting purposes only.
If you go on to receive a contextual offer from the University based on the outreach activities that you have participated in, the marker on your application record will be stored permanently.
Automated decision making and profiling
None of the personal data collected about you in providing outreach activities will be used by us as part of any automated decision making or to build a profile of you.
Your rights
You have a number of rights in respect of the data we hold about you. You can:
· Ask for a copy of your data;
· Ask us to change incorrect or incomplete data about you;
· Ask us to delete or stop processing your data, for example where we don’t need to be using it anymore;
· object to the processing of your data; and
· Ask us to stop processing data for a period if data is inaccurate or there is a dispute about it.
If you would like to do any of the above please:
· contact: outreach@soton.ac.uk; or
· use our online form;
· or write to:
The Data Protection Officer
Legal Services
University of Southampton, Highfield
Southampton, SO171BJ
Email: data.protection@soton.ac.uk
Unwanted communications
If at any stage you are concerned about any messages you receive from the Outreach Team, e.g. unwanted marketing information, or you wish to change how we let you know what we are doing, contact us at: outreach@soton.ac.uk
Further information
We also have additional policies and guidelines. If you would like further information please see our Publication Scheme at: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/about/governance/regulations-policies-guidelines.page#publication_scheme
If you are unhappy with the way that we have handled your data you can contact us at: outreach@soton.ac.uk or contact the Information Commissioner’s Office. See their website at: https://ico.org.uk/