The University of Plymouth collects some of your personal data or information to show that it is working with children as part of Devon and Cornwall Children’s University. The data we collect is name, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity (your family background, for example white British or black British) and school. We store this information securely in an online database (a record of information held on a computer) called the Higher Education Access Tracker or HEAT for short.
The personal information is kept safe and secure in line with the Data Protection Act 2018, a law which means we have to look after your data very carefully and responsibly. If you go to university we keep your data for 15 years after you finish there, if you don’t, until you reach 30 years old. We use this as evidence of providing Children’s University activities and to track or follow your data. We also check on it from time to time (which is called monitoring). This is to see if you progress into further or higher education after you have finished at secondary school or college.
This is a kind of research that we have to do for the Office for Students, which is a government body set up to oversee universities and colleges. 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. You have the right to object to us storing your data.
The data is processed for scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes. The lawful basis for this is the performance of a task carried out in the public interest and this is called Public Task.
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, access to your data is restricted which means it is only certain people who work at the University of Plymouth who are allowed to see 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 the Devon & Cornwall Children's University Privacy Policy .
You have the following rights in relation to your personal data:
- The right to request your personal data is rectified if inaccurate
- The right to request erasure of your personal data
- The right to request that the processing of your personal data is restricted
- The right of portability in relation to your personal data
- The right to withdraw your details and if you wish to do this, all your personal information will be destroyed, unless it has already been used within reports.
- The right to object to the processing of your personal data
- The right to object to processing which involves automated decision making or profiling.
For enquiries about Subject Access Requests or if you have a Data Protection query or complaint, please email dpo@plymouth.ac.uk. You also have the right to lodge a complaint about the processing of your personal data with the Information Commissioner’s Office.