School Guide's Privacy Policy


Our nice lawyers want us to share important information about what we do with the information you give us when you use School Guide and how we share that information, so here’s the legal bit.

Introduction

This privacy policy sets out how School Guide UK Limited ("We") collect and use your personal information when you access our website https://www.schoolguide.co.uk/(our site). By visiting our site and using any of its features, you are accepting and consenting to the practices described in this policy.

 

Data protection

For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 2018 (the Act), the data controller is:

School Guide UK Limited, 11 Laura Place, Bath, BA2 4BL


Data Protection Officer

School Guide's Data Protection Officer is Victoria Bond, School Guide UK Ltd, 11 Laura Place, Bath. Contact email address: [email protected]
 

Data Supervisory Authority 

School Guide UK Ltd is registered as a Data Protection Officer with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). School Guide UK Ltd is registered as a Tier 1 officer with the reference ZA061976. The registration is renewable annually, and the current registration is valid until 25 June 2021.

Users have a right to lodge a complaint with the ICO as a supervisory authority. ICO: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Telephone: 0303 123 1113. Website: www.ico.org.uk. 
 

How we may receive information about you

We may collect and process the following data about you:

(a) Information you give us. You may give us information about you by:

(i) registering a user account via email or Facebook Connect (one click sign-in);

(ii) subscribing to the School Guide newsletter with your email address;

(iii) uploading and posting reviews our site;

(iv) registering for a school noticeboard, and uploading and posting content to a school noticeboard (Staff Admin),

(v) registering to upload and post content to our forum, 

(vi) participating in any other social media functions;

(vii) using the School Guide app;

(viii) providing feedback; or

(ix) corresponding with us by phone, e-mail or otherwise.

The information you give us may include your name, address, e-mail address and phone number, personal description, school information and preferences.

(b) Information we collect about you. When you visit our site we may automatically collect the following:

(i) technical information, including the internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet, your browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform;

(ii) information about your visit, including the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL) clickstream to, through and from our site (including date and time); products you viewed or searched for; page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse away from the page.

(c) Information we receive from other sources. We may receive information about you as a result of your use of any other websites we operate or other services we provide. We may also receive information about from third parties who we work closely with.

 

Use of the information

We use the information held about you:

(a) to administer our site, our app and for internal operations;

(b) to improve our site and app to ensure that the content is presented in the most effective manner for you;

(c) to deal with enquiries and carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us;

(d) to provide you with the information, products and services that you request from us;

(e) to send you our monthly newsletter (only if you have expressly opted-in)

(f) if you are an existing user, we will only contact you by electronic means (e-mail) with information about goods and services related to our product and our services. If you are a new user, and where we permit selected third parties to use your data, we (or they) will contact you by electronic means only if you have consented to this.

 

Sharing your information

We may share your personal information with any other member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our holding company and its subsidiaries, as defined in section 1159 of the UK Companies Act 2006.

We may also share your information with selected third parties including our business partners and suppliers, advertisers and advertising networks, and analytics and search engine providers. They are not allowed to contact you unless for marketing purposes unless you have given permission for them to do so.

We may disclose your personal information to third parties if we sell or buy any business or assets, or if we are under a duty to do so in order to comply with any legal obligation; or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of School Guide UK Limited, our customers, or others.

 

Storage of your data

The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area ("EEA"). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk.

 

Retaining and deleting personal data – your rights

Our data retention policies and procedures are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal data. Personal data that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

We will explicitly inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for marketing purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. All information that may be used for marketing purposes is collected on a strictly opt-in basis. You can opt-out at any time by contacting us at [email protected].

The Act gives you the right to access information held about you. 

If you have submitted your email in order to receive our newsletter, you can use the 'Unsubscribe' link at the bottom of that newsletter if you no longer wish to receive it.

Users have a right to lodge a complaint regarding use of data to the Information Commissioner's Office as a supervistory authority. See 'Data Protection Authority', above.

You principal rights under data protection law allow you to:
access your personal data;
rectify your personal data; 
restrict the processing of your personal data;
request for your personal data to be transferred to another organisation or you;
withdraw consent for us to process your personal data;
request we erase your personal data.

Data deletion can be requested by sending an email to [email protected] and erasure will be completed, where possible, within 2 workings days and deletion will be confirmed in writing by our Data Protection Officer. 

 

Accessing other websites

Our site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

 

Conditions for processing School Census Data for our pupil heat maps

The School Census is a statutory census that takes place during the autumn, spring, and summer terms and conducted by the Department for Education. Once collected, pupil-level data from the School Census is held in the National Pupil Database (NPD). The NPD data is sourced from the Department for Education. The NPD holds detailed information about the educational establishments children attend, their achievement and progression at different key stages, their individual level characteristics including gender, ethnicity, eligibility for FSM and information about Special Educational Needs. The NPD also includes a range of other information including detailed information about pupil absence and exclusions. To request extracts of the NPD a requester will need to complete the NPD data request application form and Information security questionnaire. Decisions on whether data can be released are subject to a robust approval process and are based on a detailed assessment of who is requesting the data, the purpose for which it is required, the level and sensitivity of data requested and the arrangements in place to store and handle the data. To be granted access to extracts of the NPD requestors must comply with strict terms and conditions covering the confidentiality and handling of data, security arrangements, and retention and use of the data. Once approved, data can only be accessed via a Office for National Statistics (ONS) approved research facility, the Safer Research Service (SRS), and only by an ONS approved researcher.  Victoria Bond, CEO of School Guide UK Ltd, is School Guide's accredited ONS researcher. Data can only be processed at the ONS in accordance with their terms and conditions of processing. School Guide's data supply schedule is formalised in a license and the retention period for holding personal data is two months from the date of availbility in the ONS SRS.

School Guide is permitted access to de-identified personal level data and Sensitivity level (E), and the legal basis on which the Department for Education data is accessed is based on legislation within section 537A of the Education Act 1996 covers the sharing of pupil data from schools, as defined at section 537A(1) and section 537A(9) of the act.

The purpose of the processing is to offer parents across England access to catchment indicator heat maps, which give parents a helpful guide to admissions trends based on geographical factors. The public genefit of this work is to reduce pressure on parents as they make one of the key decisions of family life by displaying the admissions relationship between home and school via a simple visual representation of the likelihood of entry to a school based on a specific home postcode. 

School Guide processes pupil data based on the GDPR condition of 'legitimate interests', which states that the processing must be necessary for the organisation’s legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party unless there is a good reason to protect the individual’s individual data which overrides those legitimate interests. School Guide UK Ltd uses NPD data to provide a service that is popular among parents and cannot be accessed elsewhere. School Guide uses pupil data to help pupils, parents and schools.

We address the three elements to the GDPR legitimate interests condition as per here: 

(i) Identify a legitimate interest
We help parents gain access to pupil population information which is a key factor in the admissions process so parents can identify their local / closest school. We shortcut a large amount of individual research and yet never expose any individual information. It helps are very large number of parents across England.

(ii) Show that processing is necessary to achieve it
The maps are wholly based on the groupings of pupils and we could not create a visualization based on any other dataset. Once visiualized, the raw data is destroyed and our heat maps can never be reverse engineered to expose any groups of data. Note: individual data points are suppressed at source as we only ever map groups of pupils above a threshold of four in a census output area.

(iii) Balance our processing against the individual’s interests, rights and freedoms
We do not compromise any aspect of a single individual freedom as we only work with and display groups of individuals and, as such, our access to their information is part of our wider aim to help the greatest number of parents.

Individuals have the right to request School Guide removes any heat map on a permenant basis that contravenes their rights as an individual by emailing [email protected].

If you have any questions about the underlying data, how we process the data and how we store or share date, please email: [email protected]

 

Changes to this policy

Any changes we may make to our privacy policy in the future will be posted on this page. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy policy.

 

Cookies

If you are happy for us to use cookies as described below, all you have to do is continue to use our site as normal. If you would like to block any cookies, please see below for details on how to do so.

We use the following cookies for various functions and features of our site:

(a) Double Click for advertising banners.

(b) Facebook Connect for the Like button and single sign-in for our parent reviews and user account registration.

(c) Google Adsense for advertising banners.

(d) New Relic for monitoring site performance.

(e) Twitter and Facebook advertising.

(f) Typekit to display custom fonts.

(g) Rails application cookie for storing users’ session data. Used for logging in and out of user-specific areas of the site.

We use these cookies for the proper functioning of our site. If you would like to block any of the cookies used by our site, or other websites, you can do this through your browser settings. Please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org/ for more information on how to block cookies and/or delete them from your computer. Please note that if you block or delete cookies, our site may not function properly for you.

We also use certain third party tools to enhance your online experience. Some of these will set cookies on our behalf so they can work and give you access to useful features. Please note that we have no control over these cookies.

We use device identifiers to personalise ads, to provide social media features and to analyze our traffic. We use these identifiers with our third party advertising and analytics partners. We use cookies on our website to keep track of sessions, preventing you from being logged out each time you visit a new page.

 

Analytics

We use third-party analytics tools to help us measure traffic and usage trends. These tools collect information sent by your device including screens visited, duration spent on each screen, location & demographics and device & network. The data we collect can neither be attributed to an individual username nor any personal user information.

Google Analytics - We use Google Analytics to track visitors to our site. Our main aim is to find out which parts of the site are working and which are not proving to be useful. We use this information to make changes to our site and to decide on which features to improve.

See details of the Google cookies here – https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaconceptscookies

Google privacy policy – http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

 

Remarketing

We may use Remarketing and Similar Audiences to target online adverts at registered users and those who have already installed the School Guide app. Google and third parties will display these adverts on sites across the internet.

 

Facebook Connect and Your Contacts

You can log in to our site using the sign-in service Facebook Connect.

When you allow School Guide to access to your information via Facebook Connect, we will store your First Name, Last Name, Mobile Number, Landline Number and Email Address.

The data is stored securely and will never be given to any third parties.

We only use this data to allow you to securely create a user account and upload content.

We do not sync information about your contacts ('Friends'). You can remove access to your contacts at any point by deactivating it in the Facebook Connect settings on your device.

The information you share with Facebook will be governed by the privacy policy of that site. You can read the Facebook UK Data Policy here.  This Policy describes the information processed by Facebook (Facebook Products or Products). 

Important information reagrding Facebook data deletion. You have the right to request we delete your data. You can request School Guide UK Ltd deletes information it has about you from Facebook. Email: [email protected]. 

 

Contact us

Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy are welcomed and should be addressed to [email protected]