Aspire to HE Privacy Notice

What is Aspire to HE?

Aspire to HE is a nationally funded project that is based at the University of Wolverhampton. We work with lots of schools and colleges to help young people across the Black Country, Telford and Wrekin make informed and ambitious decisions about higher education and their future.

Your Privacy

We are committed to protecting your information. This notice explains how the Aspire to HE (Data Controller) collect and process your personal information.

Your school or college will provide the information we ask, we promise it will be put on a secure database in line with the Data Protection Act 2018. Only people who work for Aspire to HE, The University of Wolverhampton and our college partners will be able to see it - and even though they can see it they can’t use it for anything we haven’t told you about in this privacy notice.

Information will be stored in The Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) database - this is secure and lots of other universities use this trusted system. If you apply to university in the future no one will know that you have been involved in Aspire to HE. We won’t use your information in any way that will adversely affect you. 

When we report to the Office for Students (our Funders) no personal data is shared - We tell them things like; how many people have been on our activities, what kind of activities they took part in and the area of the country they live in. We have to do this in order to carry out our task. 

Any time data is shared we will ensure that it is done in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. We will not sell your data to anyone and we will not contact you in any way. No marketing/ no calls or letters from us and no calls or letters from our partners. 

Retention

We will keep your personal data for 15 years after you enter higher education, if you do take part in an activity, or for seven years in total if you do not take part in an activity.  This is the same amount of time which is set out in the HEAT privacy notice.

After this, we may anonymise the data and use it to research the effects of the programme. You will not be identifiable. 

Why do we collect your data?

We are collecting data about you to enable us to carry out the project, to assess the impact of this project and to track your progress through your educational journey. Personal data is the data that we will collect from you from which, either on its own or in combination with other information, you can be identified. Without collecting your data we would not be able to give a full picture of the impact we are having and report the importance of continued funding to support young people to access higher education. We need your personal data so that we can fulfil the requirements of our public task from the Office for Students and supporting young people into Higher Education. Processing your data will not affect your interests, rights or freedoms.

How do we use your Data?

We process your data to allow us to identify you as a participant, measure your participation in the activities, track our journey through education, assess equality of opportunity and to produce reports about our project and the impact or delivery we have provided. We will only process your data for the purpose of this project. 

What information do we collect?

• Full name
• Name of School or College you attend
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Home postcode (needed for statistical reasons only, we will not contact you using this information)

If you are on our database (HEAT) we can get information about you if you apply to university - this is all provided by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), The Office for Students (OfS) and The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) to track your progress. We will also share what activities you have taken part in with our chosen evaluation partner but we make sure everyone we work with takes care of your data and doesn’t share it with anyone else. This will not affect your application in any way - no one will be told you were part of Aspire to HE. 

Rights of Data Subjects

1. Right to request a copy of your information. You can request a copy of all the information which we have about you (this is known as a subject access request). Requests should be made in writing by email to: dataprotection@wlv.ac.uk
2. Right to correct mistakes in your information. You can ask us to correct any mistakes in the information which we have about you, free of charge. If you would like to do so, please write to us (see ‘Contact Us’ below) and provide us with enough information to identify you, as well as, tell us what information is incorrect and what it should be replaced with.
3. Right to have your information deleted. If you no longer want us to hold any information about you, there are a number of circumstances where you can ask to delete your information. Requests should be made in writing by email to: dataprotection@wlv.ac.uk.
4. Right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal data in certain circumstances. This means every time we process your personal data we will consider any requests you have made for us not to proceed. If you want to restrict these circumstances requests should be made in writing by email to: dataprotection@wlv.ac.uk.

Updates to this privacy notice

We review our privacy notices regularly. This privacy notice was last updated on 23 June 2023.