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Please read this privacy policy carefully. References in this policy statement to “we”, “us” and “The Hart Learning Group” are to North Hertfordshire College Further Education Corporation, Trading under the name “Hart Learning Group” and it’s subsidiaries (Hart Learning Group, Hart Learning & development, North Hertfordshire College and STEM Discovery Centre).
This policy applies between you, the user of The Hart Learning Group websites, the owner (North Hertfordshire College Further Education Corporation) and provider of this Website. The Hart Learning Group takes the privacy of your information very seriously. This privacy policy applies to our use of any and all Data collected by us or provided by you in relation to your use of our websites.
The Hart Learning Group collects personal information about our students and prospective students, their parents/carers, staff and to enable us to carry out our task of providing them with teaching and learning opportunities. This note explains what we need, what we do with the information we collect, how long we keep it and what your rights are.
North Hertfordshire College Further Education Corporation is the legal entity that operates the Hart Learning Group, and is the ‘Controller’ of the personal data you give to us.
The Hart Learning Group will not give your data to third parties (unless we are required to do so by law or regulation) nor will we ever sell your personal data to third parties.
We need to know information about students such as name, birthday, home address, email, mobile and other telephone numbers. We also need to know some information about parents or carers such as their names or contact details.
As well as this, we need to know information to help students learn effectively on their course or traineeship or apprenticeship. This will include information about how well they have learned at schools they attended before starting their programme with us, whether they need to take any medicine or have any allergies or special health needs, need particular kinds of food or, have any other special needs, or speak a language other than English etc.
We know that some of this information should be given particular protection and that only those people who need to know will be allowed to see it.
We need this personal data in order to help students learn and keep them safe while with us. We will not collect any personal data that we do not need in order to do this.
All personal data we collect is processed by our staff in the UK. In some cases, this information is held on paper, but most is stored on computer servers. These are maintained and serviced by a different company to the Hart Learning Group located within the European Union. Nobody outside the Hart Learning Group has access to this personal data unless the law allows them to have it.
We will use students’ personal data to make sure that they are learning as much as they can, and to help us decide if there are things the Group can do to help them. We will also use personal data to get in touch with students and their parents or carers to tell them about how students are getting on with their programmes, and to invite them to meetings and events happening at the college or which are part of learning.
Sometimes, we are required to give personal data to external bodies such as the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA), The Department for Education (DfE), awarding bodies, further and higher education institutions or careers organisations for funding, statutory and administrative purposes. Where the law allows it or we have a legal obligation to do so we will may be required to give personal data to relevant authorities.
We look after personal data carefully and to make sure that it is used to help the school help students learn. We make sure that it is protected from people who are not entitled to see it.
We must keep students’ personal data (name, birthday, address, contact details, records showing how well they have done on their programmes, information about their health and other needs) for at least six years after they leave us. After that, we will destroy these records securely.
We may ask students leaving the college if they wish to keep in touch. If they do, we will keep information such as name, address, contact details and the time they were at the college until they tell us that they no longer wish to receive this information.
When you visit the our website, we may send your computer a “cookie”, a small file that resides on your computer’s hard drive and allows the college to determine return users of the Website and to review how a user uses a website in order to make it more useful by tailoring the services it offers to the way(s) in which a user accesses them. Each cookie is unique to you and it can be read by the server or your browser software. You can set your browser not to accept cookies, although you may not be able to access all of the features on the Website, or the site may operate less efficien
We may also use cookies to authenticate and record your acceptance to other applicable terms and conditions and also your acceptance to the handling of other information, including personal data that you may have to provide.
Cookies cannot be executed as code or used to deliver a virus. Other servers cannot read them and personal information cannot be gathered from them. They are simply an identifier shared between you and us; we do not share them with anyone. A cookie does not give the College access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share.
The Hart Learning Group sends the following cookies to your computer:
Many of our web pages may include links to third-party websites, including buttons that link to social networking sites. These buttons are provided by the sites themselves such as Facebook and Twitter. The scripts used to generate these buttons come from from third party websites and the third parties might be setting cookies, gathering usage information and setting their own cookies. By clicking on those links or buttons you may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit. Details of our current social network providers’ privacy policies can be found here:
We will embed videos into our web pages, mostly from Vimeo. These third parties might be gathering usage information and setting their own cookies. Details of their privacy policies can be found here:
If at any point you think we have got information about you that is wrong, you or your parents or carers can ask to see this information and even have it corrected or deleted. If you wish to complain about how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer who will investigate. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Our Data Protection Officer is Robert Dale. You can contact this person by email at: dataprotectionofficer@nhc.ac.uk
Our privacy policy may be subject to change as we keep it under regular review to ensure it is up to date. You should check this page regularly to ensure that you are happy with any changes.