Widening Participation Activities Privacy Notice

Who we are

The University of Wolverhampton (‘The University’, ‘we’ or ‘us’) are a ‘Data Controller’, as defined by the Data Protection Act 2018 and are responsible for and control the processing of your Personal Data. You can contact us at email dataprotection@wlv.ac.uk, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1LY. Tel. 01902 32 1000.

This notice explains how the University of Wolverhampton collects and processes your Personal Data as part of widening participation activities we deliver.

What are Widening Participation Activities?

At The University of Wolverhampton we are committed to breaking down perceived barriers to Higher Education, ensuring that our student cohort reflects the diversity in society. We work to inspire, engage and enable those who may not consider higher education to fulfil their potential by raising their awareness, challenging barriers, supporting progression and providing opportunities to explore Higher Education.  Widening participation activities are delivered by the university to support you as prospective students and could involve visits to the university or activity delivered at your place of current study or in the community.

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. We also need your special category data to ensure equal opportunity and treatment of specific groups of people. 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. 

Your school or college will provide the information we ask, and it will be put on a secure database in line with the Data Protection Act 2018. Only people who work for The University of Wolverhampton 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 our activities. We won’t use your information in any way that will adversely affect you. 

What information do we collect?

The personal information we will process includes your full name, the name of School or College you attend, your date of birth, your gender, your home postcode (needed for statistical reasons only, we will not contact you using this information) and your free school meals/pupil premium status if it is relevant to the programme you are on.

On occasion we may also ask for ‘Special Category Data’ such as ethnicity.

If we add you to our database (HEAT) we can gain access to general information about any university applications you make - 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 any of our Widening Participation activities. 

How your information will be shared

When we report data to The Office for Students (OfS) and within our internal reports, 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. 

Rights of Data Subjects

As an individual, you have a number of rights available to you. In this instance, the following rights are available to you:

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

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.

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.

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.

How to Complain

If you have any queries, concerns or believe that your Personal Data is being handled in a manner which is contrary to statutory requirements, you may wish to contact the University of Wolverhampton’s Data Protection Officer via dataprotection@wlv.ac.uk or complain to the ICO via www.ico.org.uk

Updates to this privacy notice

We review our privacy notices regularly. This privacy notice was last updated on 24/11/2023.

Contact us

Natalie Latham

UK Access and WP Manager

University of Wolverhampton

The Gateway at The George

MG207

Stafford Street 

Wolverhampton

WV1 1LY

07890 093 522

dataprotection@wlv.ac.uk