Privacy Policy

This page explains what the College does with the personal information you provide us.

General

From time to time you will be asked to tell us personal information about yourself (e.g. name and email address etc) in order to become a learner or a client, to use college systems and services and so on. At the point of collecting the information we aim to clearly explain what it is going to be used for and who we may share it with. Unless required or permitted by law, we will always ask you before we use it for any other reason. We would only use it for marketing with your prior consent.

Coleg y Cymoedd will be the data controller for the personal information it receives from you.  We will use this data in order to process administration related to the services we provide to you

Any sensitive personal information will never be supplied to anyone outside the college without first obtaining your consent, unless required or permitted by law. We comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including removing your personal information from our systems when it is no longer required and ensuring that all personal information supplied is held securely.

Whenever you provide such personal information, we will treat that information in accordance with this statement, current legislation and our Data Protection Registration (Registration Number: Z7228714). We also aim to meet current best practice.

Individuals whose personal information the college holds have certain rights under the law. More information can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website.

Enrolment

This section explains how the college uses the personal information that you give us on the enrolment form.

How the College uses your information

The information will be used for purposes relating to education, training, employment, general advice services, well-being and research. The college may share non-sensitive personal information about you with other organisations, for example the Local Authority (see below), for these purposes. We do not share your information for purposes that are incompatible, such as product marketing.

Sensitive personal information you provide (eg. disability or ethnicity) may be used by the college for the purposes of equality of opportunity, support for your studies and to minimise risk. It may also be used anonymously for statistical purposes. The college will ask your permission before sharing sensitive information with other organisations, unless the sharing is permitted by law and necessary.

How government departments use your information

We pass information to the Welsh Government to meet funding arrangements.  further information on what happens with this data can be found in “Lifelong Learning Wales Record Privacy Notice (2018)”.

The legal basis for collecting the information

Most of the information on the form is collected because it is necessary for your enrolment as a learner or is required by law. You must provide it in order to enrol at the College.

The following information we are collecting based on your consent, and you may withdraw your consent without this affecting your status as a learner: emergency contact details and parent/carer contact details.

Parents, carers and guardians

Under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), young people aged 16 and over can decide for themselves and give consent for the processing of their personal information. Parental consent is not required. There may be exceptions in regards of learners with severe learning difficulties, school link learners and those who are otherwise unable to decide for themselves.

The College has found that it is very beneficial to the young person’s progress as a learner if the College is able to engage with the parents (or guardian/carer). Therefore it is very important that we have the parents’ details recorded on our systems.

When a learner is in Further Education, parents/carers/guardians (or any other third party) are not automatically entitled to the learner’s information. We can only release information about our learners if we have their consent for this recorded on the College system. Learners are asked for their consent for sharing information with parents/others on the enrolment form or when enrolling face-to-face. Learners can also inform the College later on of who the College may discuss with about their College matters. Learners may withdraw their consent the same way which they gave it.

In general, we can only share information if we have the person’s consent, or there is a particular piece of legislation or agreement allowing us to share it without consent.

Participation in Learning: Sharing information with Local Authorities and Careers Wales

The College works with Careers Wales and LAs to promote the effective participation in education or training of all 16 to 25 year olds resident in their area, and to make arrangements to identify young people resident in their area who are not participating. It is part of the LA’s duties to secure sufficient suitable education and training provision for all 16-25 year olds, and to encourage, enable and assist young people to participate in learning.  To this end the College and partners have developed ISPs (Information Sharing Protocols) to aid this process of supporting young people into gainful education, employment or training. As part of this ISP the participants may also provide us with information about you per the agreement.

When you give us your information, and the necessary consent, we will use your details to inform the Careers Wales and the LA where you live about the learning that you are participating in so that they are able to support residents of their area.

Please note that some of the services for young people provided by the LA to fulfil their duties are provided by commissioned external contractors and organisations and they are required to use the same security standards as the LA.

College Privacy Notice Part II (Enrolment) gives further detail on the management of enrolment data

Websites and Cookies

This section applies to anyone accessing College websites and services (such as College App, internal college systems)

A cookie is a small file, typically of letters and numbers, downloaded on to your device (e.g. your PC) when you access the College website. Cookies allow the website to recognise your device and so distinguish between the different users that access the site.

Session cookies will remember your selections as you browse the site. These cookies are for the browsing session and not stored long term. No personal information is collected by these cookies.

Google Analytics cookies help us to make the website better for you by providing us with user statistics, for example: which pages are the most visited; how a user navigates the site. No personal information is collected by these cookies.

You may delete or control the use of cookies through your browser.  Further down this page we have included a section with more detail on the college cookies and privacy.

To find out more about cookies and what cookies might be stored on your device, visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org

During the course of your study you may be asked to use third party websites or services or access linked content (e.g. Youtube, Mahara) which may collect personal data about you. That site’s own privacy notice will explain you how they use your data.

Your rights and choices

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have the right to:

• Access the personal data The College holds on you
• Require the College to rectify inaccuracies in that data
• To object to processing on ground relating to your particular situation (in some circumstances)
• Restrict processing (in some circumstances)
• Have your data erased (in some circumstances)
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), who is the independent regulator for data protection.

We only keep data as long as is necessary.  The college document/data retention policy describes this in more detail.

Notification of changes

If we are going to use your data in a different way from that stated at the time we collect it, you will be notified.  All of the data we process will be in compliance with current data protection legislation.  Updates to the privacy notice will be available on our website: /privacy

Responsibilities

The College as a corporate body is the data controller under the Data Protection Act, and the Board of Governors is therefore ultimately responsible for implementation.

The designated data protection officer (DPO) who is appointed to ensure compliance with the Act is the Director of Learner Services.

Further information

If you have any questions about Data Protection at the College, please contact:

Data-protection@cymoedd.ac.uk

Data Protection Officer, Coleg y Cymoedd, Twyn road,Ystrad Mynach, Hengoed. CF82 7XR

If you have a data protection concern that cannot or have not been resolved by the College, you have the right to raise it with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

College Privacy Notice Part II (Enrolment)

What personal information about you is collected and used by The College?

Some of the data collected will be personal data and/or special category data as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation which includes:

Personal Data

Learner ID NumberSurnameForenameMiddle NamesTitleDate of BirthGenderSurname on 16th BirthdayAddressPostcodeHome Telephone NumberMobile Telephone NumberEmergency Contact NameEmergency Contact TelephoneNational IdentitySchool Last AttendedYear Left SchoolKnown As NameUK Residency StatusCountry of OriginDate Entered UKMilitary Family Indicator

Special Category Data

EthnicityCriminal Offence IndicatorDisability TypeLooked After IndicatorHealth ConditionYoung Carer Indicator

How will your data be used by The College?

• For College and Course administrative and management purposes
• To help us monitor your progress on your course and to provide support and guidance where appropriate
• To help us make decisions on current and future courses
• To give auditors the information they need to do their job
• To help monitor equality and diversity
• For analysis and research to identify patterns and similarities and to inform College Policy
• To produce statistics for stakeholders and to measure College, Course and Learner performance
• By contractors working on research and evaluation commissioned by The College

Who does The College share your data with?

Currently, The College shares your data with these third parties: The Welsh Government, Careers Wales; Estyn; The Learner Records Service, The Cwm Taff Prevent and Channel Programme; the Education Departments of Rhondda Cynon Taff, Caerphilly County and Merthyr Tydfil Borough Councils.  If you are taking a University Franchise course, your data will be shared with the relevant University.  If you participate in our Upshot Programme, your data will also be shared with Sports Wales.  The College does not share data with third party marketing organisations.

Data Sharing Agreements

The College has formal data sharing agreements in place whenever we share your data with a third party.  Part of the agreement means that the third party will have to sign a confidentiality agreement in relation to your data to show that they operate satisfactory information security procedures and that they destroy their copies of your data when it is no longer needed.  They can only use your data for the reason they sign up to and nothing else.  All copies of data transfers are logged and recorded. 

Security Arrangements

The data the College collects about your will be stored in an access controlled secure database which is regularly tested for safety and integrity.

Cookies and Privacy

This Cookies and Privacy policy sets out how Coleg y Cymoedd uses and protects any information that you give Coleg y Cymoedd when you use this website.

Coleg y Cymoedd is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

Coleg y Cymoedd may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. 

Cookies

To make this site work better for you, we sometimes place small data files on your computer.  These are known as cookies. They improve things by:-

– Remembering information you’ve given so you don’t need to keep entering it

– Measuring how you use this website so we can make sure it meets your needs

Our cookies are not used to identify you personally. To learn more about cookies and how to manage them, visit AboutCookies.org

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Our use of cookies

Coleg y Cymoedd uses cookies in several places – we’ve listed each of them below with more details about why we use them and how long they will last.

If you have any queries about these cookies or would like more information, please contact Matt Jarvis, Web Officer.

Measuring website usage (Google Analytics)

We use Google Analytics to collect information about how site visitors use this site.  We do this to make sure it’s meeting user needs and to understand how we can make it better.

Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, what platform you access the site on together with several other topics. Google does not collect or store your personal information (e.g your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are.  We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data.

The following cookies are set by Google Analytics:

Name		Typical Content	Expires	Purpose
_ga		Randomly generated number	2 years	Associated to Google Analytics.
_gat		1	10 minutes	Associated to Google Analytics.  Limits the collection of data on high traffic sites

For more information about the Google Analytics tracking cookie, visit the Google Analytics website

Social Bookmarking

Some visitors to our site like to share some of the information they find on social networking sites.  A package called AddThis is installed on certain areas of The College’s website to enable this. For further information about AddThis, check out their Privacy Policy

Name	Typical Content	Expires
__atuvc	Randomly generated number	2 years

 Language Selection

With our site being fully bilingual, we like to remember your preference for the last language (English or Welsh) that you viewed our site in order to display this course 

Name		Typical Content	Expires	Purpose
language		either ‘en’ or ‘cy’	3 months	Remembers the choice of language you would prefer to view the website

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Removing and disabling cookies

If you do not wish to accept cookies on to your machine you can disable them by adjusting the settings on your browser.  However this may affect the functionality of this website.

If you have any queries about these cookies or would like more information, please contact Marketing