Privacy policy

Our Privacy Policy

IntoUniversity undertakes to respect and look after all personal data provided to the charity. We will always keep it safe, we will endeavour to be clear when we collect your data about what we’ll use it for, and we won’t do anything that you wouldn’t reasonably expect. We will never sell your personal data to other organisations, and we will only ever share it in appropriate, legal or exceptional circumstances.

We collect information in the following ways:

When you give it to us directly

You may give us your information when you register for our programme, volunteer with us, work for us, make a donation, or otherwise directly engage with the charity.

When you give it to us indirectly

Your information may be shared with us by other organisations, for example via a fundraising site such as JustGiving. These independent third party organisations will only do this if you’ve indicated you’re happy for them to do so. You should check their Privacy Policy when you provide your information to understand fully how they will process your data.

When it is publicly available

The charity believes that preliminary research into potential donors is an essential part of fundraising. We may collect information that has been published in Companies House, the Charity Commission for England and Wales, Office for the Scottish Charity Regulator, or media reports.

When we collect it as you use our website

Like most websites, we use cookies to help us make our site, and the way you use it, better. Cookies mean that a website will remember you. They’re small text files that sites transfer to your device. They make interacting with a website faster and easier.

As well as this, cookies can tell us the type of device you’re using to access our website and the settings that device may provide us with information including what type of device it is, what operating system you’re using, what your device settings are, and why a crash has happened. This information helps us understand how people are using our website and shows how to make it better.

Your device manufacturer or operating system provider will have more details about what information your device makes available to us.

How we use the personal data we collect

What we use your information for depends on why you are providing it. We will mainly use you or your child’s data to: 

Provide you or your child with access to our programmes

When you participate in an IntoUniversity programme, we’ll need to store some personal data about you. We’ll collect some of this information when you register, some while you’re on the programme, and some when you leave.

It’s really important that you know what personal data we store, why we store it, and what we do with it.

When you register

At registration, we ask you for some basic information including your contact details, date of birth, school details, and your next of kin details. This is the basic personal information that we need so that we can enrol you on our programme and communicate with you or your parent/carer/guardian.

We also collect details of any medical conditions that you have. We need this to comply with our health and safety obligations.

Finally, we ask you for details of your ethnicity – this is so we can monitor the effectiveness of our programme on students from specific backgrounds as part of our commitment to working towards equality of opportunity.

While you’re on our programme

We’ve set out below the main ways that we’ll use your data while you’re on our programme.

There are some types of data processing that we do whichever strand of the programme you register for:

• We record details of the programmes that you attend. We use this both for internal administrative purposes, and also to monitor the effectiveness of our programme. In addition, we may report details of your attendance to your school so it is fully aware of the support that you receive from us as it may inform the support that it provides you.

• When you complete a programme, we normally ask you to complete an evaluation form. For certain programmes, we also ask your parent/carer/guardian to complete an evaluation form. We use these evaluations to report back on an aggregated, anonymous basis to a number of our partners – we may use a quote from your evaluation, but we won’t include your full name if we do. Where evaluations highlight any matters which we feel are relevant to share with your school, we will do so to ensure that you are provided with the right support.

• Where you take part in external workshops or go on trips with us, we may be required to provide some basic details to partner organisations delivering the workshops, hosting visits, or providing accommodation. This will only ever be for administrative, security or health and safety purposes.

• We sometimes take photos or videos of students participating in our programme which we use for marketing and for reporting to our partners and supporters. We will always let you know when we will be taking photos or videos and you will always be able to ask not to be photographed or filmed.

• We record details of behaviour management incidents on our database and, depending on the nature of the incident, we may need to share details with your parent/carer/guardian, and if required, your school.

• Where safeguarding concerns arise, we record details of the safeguarding incidents on our database and process these in line with our safeguarding procedures. The procedures may require us to share information with relevant professionals including your school, social services, medical professionals, or the police.

If you take part in our Academic Support programme:

• When you first register for the programme, we have a face-to-face conversation with you and your parent/carer/guardian to collect details of your eligibility for the programme.

• We record details of the work that you undertake in Academic Support sessions, the progress that you make against learning goals, and details of your career ambitions and educational aspirations, so that we can tailor our support for you appropriately and to help us to measure the impact of our programme.

• We may share relevant details of the work you undertake at IntoUniversity with your school so that both IntoUniversity and your school can ensure that we’re providing you with the right support.

• Where we are provided with attainment data or school reports by you, your parent/carer/guardian, or your school, we attach these to your record in our database, both to enable us to provide appropriate support, and to help us to measure the impact of our programme.

If you take part in our Primary FOCUS programme:

• As you take part in our programme with the rest of your school class, we ask your school to provide us with your basic details so that we can track the support that we provide. This also includes details of whether you meet the eligibility criteria for our programme – even if you don’t, you’ll still be able to take part in the Primary FOCUS programme, but this will help us assess what further support we’re able to offer you.

• If you let us know about your career and educational goals, we’ll record these on our database so that we can tailor our support for you appropriately.

• If you attend our programme in Year 6 (in England) or Primary 7 (in Scotland), we make a note of the secondary school that you’ll be joining. We either ask you directly for this information, or we ask your school to provide these details. We do this so that we can assess whether we’ll be able to provide you with ongoing support – and if we can, we’ll get in touch with your new school to arrange this.

If you take part in our Secondary FOCUS programme:

• We check that you meet the eligibility criteria for our programme. We either ask you directly for this information, or we ask your school to provide these details.

• If you’re in sixth form, college or in S5/S6 (in Scotland), we ask you whether you’re happy to connect with us on social media.

• We record details of your career and educational plans so that we can provide you with tailored support and let you know about relevant opportunities that arise.

• If you move to an alternative school, we’ll make a note of your new school. We’ll either ask you directly for this information, or we ask your school to provide these details. We do this so that we can assess whether we’ll be able to provide you with ongoing support – and if we can, we’ll get in touch with your new school to arrange this.

If you take part in our Mentoring programme:

• We need to check that you meet the eligibility criteria for our programme. We’ll either ask you directly for this information, or we ask your school to provide these details.

• We record details of the meetings that you have with your mentor, activities that you’ve undertaken together, and details of mid-term and end-of-term reviews, so that we can provide the right support to you both, and to help us monitor whether the mentoring relationship is working as we hoped.

If you take part in our Student Enrichment programme:

• When you apply for a student enrichment opportunity through us with a third party host organisation, we will collect the information that we need to consider and assess your application.

• If the organisation is involved in the assessment process, we will also share relevant application information with that organisation.

• We may need to check that you meet the eligibility criteria for the opportunity. We’ll either ask you directly for this information, or we ask your school to provide these details. This information will not be provided to the host organisation.

If your application is successful:

• We may need to share certain information with the host organisation, including your dietary requirements, medical requirements, so that the provider can make any necessary adjustments for your opportunity.
• We will share your contact details with the host organisation so that they contact you about your opportunity.

• The host organisation may provide us with updates about student progress so that we can ensure that student is being provided with appropriate support, and to ensure that the programme is operating effectively. 

• The host organisation and IntoUniversity may share your feedback in order to ensure that the programme is operating effectively. 

 Once you’ve left our programme:

Our programme is designed to provide long-term support for the young people that it works with. While some students will remain engaged with us throughout their time at school, others will attend programmes at primary school and then re-engage with the charity later on.

We believe that it would be contrary to the long-term pastoral nature of the programme if we deemed that students left the programme while still at school – this would be against the interests of the young people that we support. Therefore, while you remain of school age, we consider that you remain a participant in the charity’s programme and so we’ll keep the data we hold about you.

When you complete Year 13 in England or S6 in Scotland (or are of equivalent age), you’ll no longer be considered to be a participant in the programme and therefore we’ll remove access to data which is only relevant to the delivery of the programme.

We’ll continue to retain data which we need to monitor the effectiveness of our programme for another five years. In particular, it is important for us to be able to track what our students go on to do once they’ve left school, so we’ll contact you after you’ve finished school to ask about your plans, and then we’ll contact you again five years later to see how you’re getting on with your career and/or studies.

We will also share details of your engagement with us with the Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT), which has a separate retention policy – please see the Higher Education Access Tracker section below.

We’ll also ask you when you finish school whether you would like to join our Student Associate Network. If you agree to do so we’ll add you to the Student Associate Network mailing list.

Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT)

As part of your involvement with IntoUniversity, we may share a level of data with HEAT. The data that we share will be your name, date of birth, postcode, school, year group, gender and details of the IntoUniversity programmes that you’ve attended.

HEAT is a national non-profit-making collaboration between Higher Education (HE) outreach providers that is owned and developed by members. It provides a monitoring and evaluation service for member institutions engaged in widening participation (WP) to HE, providing efficient and cost-effective data management, analysis and reporting of all aspects of their outreach activities. An online database is available for subscribing Higher Education providers (HEPs) and organisations that deliver outreach to widen participation. HEAT negotiates access to educational data to investigate what happens to outreach participants. The Service then disseminates this information to its members, using the data collectively to underpin research into relationships between outreach participation and key student outcomes – including HE entry and success in HE. It was set up and is administered via staff based at the University of Kent.

Data recorded in HEAT will be held securely in line with HEAT’s retention schedule. This usually means keeping this data until you are 30 years old, or for 15 years from your graduation if you enter higher education. The HEAT data retention schedule has been scrutinised by the Information Commissioner’s Office and will be subject to a regular schedule of review so as to ensure it remains fit for purpose and compliant with relevant legislation.

The full privacy information relating to HEAT is available at: https://heat.ac.uk/data-privacy-participants/ Please let us know if you have any queries relating to the HEAT project.

Who we share your data with

We’ve set out above a number of instances of when we will need to share your data with schools, work experience providers, and partner organisations.

We may also share your name, date of birth, postcode, school, year group, gender, details of the IntoUniversity programmes that you’ve attended  and information that we collect about your post-school progression with IntoUniversity’s third party partners, including the Office for Students (OfS), Higher Education Statistics Agency or the University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and colleges, universities, Higher Education Access Tracker service subscribers and the National Data Service. We’ll only do this to enable us to evaluate or report on the effectiveness and impact of IntoUniversity’s programmes, as part of government policy to widen participation in higher education and to develop future educational policy.

At the point that you’re applying for a place at university, we may ask for your consent to pass on your contact information to our partner universities who are keen to support IntoUniversity students. The specific support offered will depend on each university’s offering, but may include support from the university’s outreach and/or admissions team, invitations to events for offer-holders, access to resources to help you prepare for university, opportunities to talk to an existing student, and support for university contextual admissions processes.

We take steps to require that these third parties with which we may share your personal information take care of that information (such as by ensuring that personal information is anonymised and aggregated when used for reporting purposes) and only use it for the purposes for which we give it to them.

Finally, our North Kensington centre is operated in conjunction with our sister charity The ClementJames Centre. Therefore, for operational reasons, The ClementJames Centre also has access to student data relating to the North Kensington centre, and where operational requirements dictate also to relevant data in other centres.

Provide you with opportunities to volunteer for the charity

How we use your data

When you volunteer at IntoUniversity, we’ll need to store some personal data about you. We’ll collect some of this information when you apply, some while you’re volunteering, and some when you leave.

It’s really important that you know what personal data we store, why we store it, and what we do with it.

Becoming a volunteer

When you apply via the IntoUniversity website

When you apply to volunteer for an IntoUniversity programme, we collect the information that we need to process your application. We ask for your contact details, and which volunteering opportunity you’re applying for. We also ask for details of your educational and employment history and answers to a number of application questions in order to assess your application.

If you apply to volunteer for our Academic Support or Mentoring programmes, you will be invited to attend a training and selection day. Based on your participation on the day, we make notes to help us to assess your suitability for the role. If you’re successful, we ask you to provide reference details, and we also need you to complete a DBS application (in England) or PVG application (in Scotland).

When you volunteer via your workplace

If you sign up to a volunteering opportunity that your employer has arranged with IntoUniversity, we collect details of your name, role, and contact details. We either obtain this information from you or from your employer.

When you volunteer via your university

If you sign up to a volunteering opportunity that your university, university department, or university society has arranged with IntoUniversity, we collect details including your name, contact details, university and course. We either obtain this information from you or from your university.

Other ad-hoc volunteering

If you volunteer for us for a one-off opportunity that doesn’t require a full application process, and it’s not arranged via your workplace or university, then we collect some basic information including your name, contact details, and some relevant educational or employment details.

While you’re volunteering

During the course of your volunteering, we’ll process your data in a number of ways:

• We record details of the programmes that you volunteer for, and if you are a mentor, details of the content of the meetings that you have with your mentee. The information recorded may also include details of support that you have provided to specific students.

• We normally ask you to complete an evaluation form. We use these evaluations to report back on an aggregated, anonymous basis to a number of our partners – we may use a quote from your evaluation, but we won’t include your full name if we do.

• We hold review meetings with you during the course of your volunteering, in order to ensure that we’re providing you with the right support. We’ll attach these to your record on our database.

• Where you volunteer on trips or external workshops, we may be required to provide some basic details to partner organisations delivering the workshops or hosting visits. This will only ever be for administrative, security or health and safety purposes.

• We sometimes take photos or videos of volunteers participating in our programme which we use for marketing and for reporting to our partners and supporters. We will always let you know when we will be taking photos or videos and you will always be able to ask not to be photographed or filmed.

• Where safeguarding concerns arise, we record details of the safeguarding incidents on our database and process these in line with our safeguarding procedures. The procedures may require us to share information with relevant professionals including schools, social services, medical professionals, or the police.

Once you’ve stopped volunteering

• We keep your volunteering records on our database for 6 years following the end of the academic year in which you last volunteered.

• We then keep a summary record for another 10 years to allow us to prepare accurate references.

Who we share your data with

We’ve set out above some instances of when we will need to share your data with partner organisations.

If you work for an organisation or attend a university that partners with IntoUniversity, we may let your university or workplace know about the volunteering that you’ve undertaken. This will help them with their administrative and record-keeping requirements for volunteers, it will enable them to offer support and opportunities to volunteers, and it will also support their measurement and evaluation of the impact of volunteering.

Finally, our North Kensington centre is operated in conjunction with our sister charity The ClementJames Centre. Therefore, for operational reasons, The ClementJames Centre also has access to volunteer data relating to the North Kensington centre, and where operational requirements dictate also to relevant data in other centres.

Provide you with opportunities to support the charity financially 

If you donate to us, as a minimum we’ll look to collect the information required to process your donation.

If you are a potential or current financial supporter of the charity, we may also record additional information including details of employment and education, contact details, and details of philanthropy for both the charity and more widely. We may use your data to communicate with you about specific opportunities to engage with the charity.

We will not use your data for wealth screening.

Provide you with opportunities to work for the charity

If you register for job alerts with us, we’ll let you know when roles become available that you may be interested in.

If you apply to work with us, we will use your data to (1) assess your application to work for the charity; (2) to organize selection days, interviews, or other recruitment activities; (3) for the purpose of communicating with you about your application; and (4) to provide a record of our recruitment process for audit purposes and to respond to queries.

Keep you updated with news of the charity’s activities and events

With your consent, we will use your data to send you regular updates about IntoUniversity’s work. Every couple of years, the charity produces an Impact Report, showing evidence of the impact of the charity’s work, and we may also provide you with a copy of this report if we believe this will be of interest to you. We may also let you know of events that the charity is running, but we will always try to ensure that you’re only sent invitations for events which we feel may interest you.

Keep a record of your relationship with us

It’s important for us to have clear records on how you’ve supported us or have been supported by us in the past. This helps us ensure that our engagement with you is as relevant as possible, and also allows us to monitor the effectiveness of our programme over the long-term

Sharing your data

We do not sell or share personal details to third parties for the purposes of marketing.

In the sections above, we’ve set out details of when we’ll need to share your details with third party organisations. If we ever need to share data, we will always take the utmost care, and we will make sure only essential data is transferred, and that it’s done so securely and safely.

The charity may also be required to share your details in exceptional circumstances. For example, where legally required by the police, regulatory bodies or legal advisors.

Where we need to share your details for any purposes other than those set out in this privacy policy, we will only do so with your consent.’

How we keep your data safe and who has access

We make sure that there are appropriate measures and controls in place to protect your personal details.

Before we use any external companies to collect or process personal data on our behalf, we will do comprehensive checks. Suppliers who run their operations outside the European Economic Area (EEA) are not subject to the same data protection laws as companies based in the UK. However, if we ever choose to use a supplier based outside of the EEA, we will make sure they provide an adequate level of protection in accordance with UK data protection law.

Keeping your information up to date

We try and keep our records up-to-date so we can send you the most relevant information, using the correct contact details. If your personal details change, we’d really appreciate it if you let us know.

Your right to access your data

You have a right to ask us to stop processing your personal data, and if it’s not necessary for the purpose you provided it to us for (e.g. processing your donation or registering you for an event) we will do so.

You have a right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you. If there are any discrepancies in the information we provide, please let us know and we will correct them.

If you want to access your information, please send a description of the information you want to see any proof of your identity by post to IntoUniversity Head Office, 95 Sirdar Road, London W11 4EQ. We do not accept these requests by email. This is so we can make sure that we only provide personal data to the right person.

If you have any questions please send these to dataprotection@intouniversity.org, and for further information see the Information Commissioner’s guidance here.