The University needs to collect and process student personal data in order to provide teaching, learning and research as well as to enable the necessary function of the institution and comply with its statutory obligations.
When you work as a Student Ambassador the University of Plymouth collects some of your personal data or information to show that it is supporting its students. The data we collect is name, date of birth, postcode and ethnicity. We store this information securely in an online database called the Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT).
The personal information is kept safe and secure in line with the Data Protection Act 2018 and is stored on HEAT for 15 years after you finish at University. This provides evidence of how our students support activities for schools and their students and it also allows the University to track and monitor your data.
We process data provided to us by students to show that we are supporting those students identified as being from groups underrepresented in higher education, e.g., students who are disabled. These are defined by the Office for Students, the University’s regulators, who are a government body. The data is processed for scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes and the lawful basis for this is the performance of a task carried out in the public interest. This is called Public Task.
All of your data is kept strictly confidential. You will not be identifiable in any reports or publications and will remain anonymous throughout this process.
Sometimes your information is shared with other organisations which are part of the government, or work with the government, or are involved in education. Apart from this, your data is restricted to those University staff who need access to process it. We do not share your data with external organisations for marketing their products or services and we do not, under any circumstances, sell this personal data to anyone.
We use Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) to manage our data. They each have their own privacy notices that you can refer to. Your data will be retained on these platforms to track and monitor so as to enable statistical aggregation and analysis. Your data will be shared between HEAT and HESA (the Designated Data Body for England under the Higher Education Research Act 2017) and their respective policies can be seen here.
Privacy notice for HEAT
Privacy notice for HESA
For more details please refer to our student privacy notice .