Widening participation and outreach for parents and carers privacy notice
The University of Surrey uses the Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) service to record information about its outreach activities and the students who take part in these activities. HEAT helps us identify which activities are most helpful in preparing students for higher education and progressing to employment.
Personal data is collected on a Student Information form which is filled in when your child is about to start in Year 7 of secondary school or before they participate in an outreach activity organised by our team.
The type of data collected includes:
- Name
- Date of birth
- School
- Postcode
- Information that may fall into a ‘special category’ data for example:
- Ethnicity
- Disability/accessibility requirements.
More information about our widening participation categories and the type of information we collect can be found at our targeting and eligibility criteria page.
Additional information may be obtained via HEAT from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, UCAS, the Department for Education, the National Pupil Database, the Office for Students and other agencies for research purposes only.
This data can provide information about the school your child attends and the area in which you live, for example, how many people from your area go on to higher education. Data from these sources will also let us know about your child's educational journey.
Where we have your consent, we will share information with the Higher Education Outreach Network (HEON), part of the National Networks for Collaborative Outreach, and the online mentoring platform brightside.
The data we collect enables us to track individual journeys into further education, higher education and employment to measure the effectiveness of outreach activities. Collecting demographic information also enables us to develop activities that will support particular groups of students and to provide for any disability your child may have.
We may also publish anonymised reports based on the data provided by HEAT that do not identify individuals. At no time will your child's data be passed to external organisations or individuals not already mentioned above.
The University processes personal data and special category data in accordance with data protection legislation and Our Data Policy Statement (PDF) (incorporating Information Security Policy).
To enable us to provide a high quality programme of activities we compare activities to determine which ones help students to move into Higher Education and onto employment and in accordance with the University's own Data Protection Policy (PDF).
HEAT will retain data for as long as the service is in existence for the purpose of the longitudinal study.
As an individual whose child's data we process (a data subject), you have certain rights in relation to the processing. Find detailed information about your rights as a data subject.
You have the right to:
- Withdraw your consent for us to process your child's personal data where we have relied on that consent as our basis for processing your child's data.
- Ask us to confirm that your child's personal data is being processed and to gain access (i.e. have a copy) of that data as well as to be provided with supplemental information about the processing.
- Request that we rectify any inaccuracies where the data we hold on your child is inaccurate or incomplete.
- Have your child's data erased by us, although in certain circumstances we may not be able to do this. The circumstances where this applies can be found in the guide to data subject rights information.
- Restrict the processing of your child's personal data in certain ways.
- Obtain your child's personal data for reuse.
- Object to certain processing of your child's personal data.
If you would like to exercise any of your rights please visit our make a privacy request section.
Make a complaint
If you have any concerns about the way that we have handled your child's personal data please email the Data Protection team as we would like to have the opportunity to resolve your concerns.
If you’re still unhappy, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (an independent body set up to advise on information rights for the UK) about the way in which we process your personal data.