This webpage explains how we use information about you and what we do with it.
We call this information your ‘personal data’ or ‘personal information.’
Under the law, people have a right to be informed about how school uses any information we collect about them. This ‘privacy notice’ (sometimes called a ‘fair processing notice’) tells you how we use your personal data.
Who we are
Your school is part of the multi-academy trust called Ark Schools. Ark Schools is the organisation which is in charge of your personal information. This means that Ark Schools is called the ‘Data Controller’. The postal address for Ark Schools is 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN.
If you want to contact us about your personal information you can email Ark’s Data Protection Officer using the email address data.protection@arkonline.org.
The personal data we hold about you
Personal data that we may collect, use, store and share (when appropriate) about you includes, but is not restricted to:
- Name
- Contact details
- Details about your time at the school, including records of your achievements and interests
- Photographs of your time at the school
- Details of your education, experience, career and employers since you left the school
- Records of contributions you have made to the school since leaving, such as your time, expertise or money
- Records of how you have engaged with our alumni network, including emails you have opened, events attended, mailing lists you have signed up to and any other interactions
- Information required to manage your attendance at alumni events, including access arrangements and dietary requirements (which could amount to ‘special category’ personal data, which is more sensitive)
- Bank details and other financial information, if you make any payments to the school
- Records associated with Gift Aid claims on donations
Why we collect and use this data
We use this data to:
- Help us build a community around the school and the Ark Schools alumni network. This includes your participation in Hivebrite, our online alumni community platform, where you have given consent and activated your profile
- Offer enrichment and career development opportunities to current pupils
- Evaluate the effectiveness of our programmes so that we can provide further career development support to alumni and improve our programmes for current pupils
- Raise extra money so that we can continue to improve the experience pupils get from the school
- Notify you of alumni events you may be interested in
- Keep you up to date with school news
- Help us promote the school
- Keep you safe and comfortable while attending alumni events
- Tailor the communications we send to you, to ensure they are appropriate and relevant.
- Use of your personal information for marketing purposes
Use of your personal information for marketing purposes
Where you have given us consent to do so, your school and/or Ark Schools may send you marketing information by email or text promoting school events, campaigns, charitable causes or services that may be of interest to you. You can withdraw consent or ‘opt out’ of receiving these texts and/or emails at any time by clicking on the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any such communication, or by contacting our data protection officer
How we collect this information
Some of the information we collect from you is mandatory, and in some cases you can choose whether or not to provide the information to us.
Whenever we seek to collect information from you, we make it clear whether you must provide this information (and if so, what the possible consequences are of not complying), or whether you have a choice. We will only collect the data that we need in order to fulfil our purposes, which are set out above.
When we give your information to others
We do not share information about alumni with any third party without consent unless the law and our policies allow us to do so.
Where it is legally required, or necessary (and it complies with data protection law) we may share personal information about alumni with:
- Our local authority – to meet our legal obligations to share certain information with it, such as where the alumni information is relevant to a safeguarding concern
- The Department for Education
- Suppliers and service providers – to enable them to provide the service we have contracted them for. This includes Hivebrite, our online alumni community platform. If you have activated your profile, you can find more details about how we process your personal data through Hivebrite, on the site.
- Central and local government, e.g. HMRC – to meet our accounting and reporting obligations relating to donations received
- Our auditors
- Survey and research organisations
How long we keep your information
We will keep your personal data while you remain involved in our alumni network. We may also keep it beyond this, if necessary, to comply with our legal obligations.
Our data retention schedule sets out how long we keep information about alumni. You can email data.protection@arkonline.org to request a copy.
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.
We will dispose of your personal data securely when we no longer need it.
Your rights
You have the right to do the following:
- You can ask us for a copy of the information we have about you. This is called a ‘subject access request.’
- You can ask us to correct any information we have about you if you think it is wrong.
- You can ask us to erase information about you (although we may have good reasons why we cannot do this).
- You can ask us to limit what we are doing with your information.
- You can object to what we are doing with your information.
- You can ask us to transfer your information to another organisation in a format that makes it easy for them to use.
If you make a subject access request, and if we do hold information about you, we will:
- Give you a description of it
- Tell you why we are holding and processing it, and how long we will keep it for
- Explain where we got it from, if not from you or your child
- Tell you who it has been, or will be, shared with
- Let you know whether any automated decision-making is being applied to the data, and any consequences of this
- Give you a copy of the information in an intelligible form
Individuals also have the right for their personal information to be transmitted electronically to another organisation in certain circumstances.
There is more information in the Ark Schools Data Protection Policy.
If you want to contact us about your personal information, you can email data.protection@arkonline.org.
You can issue a complaint about what we do with your personal information. If you are not happy with our answer to your complaint, then you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Tel: 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 if you prefer to use a national rate number.
Note 1: Legal basis for holding and processing personal data
We only collect and use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we process it where we have obtained explicit consent to use it in a certain way, and where we have legitimate interests in processing the data.
Where we have obtained consent, this consent can be withdrawn at any time. We will make this clear when we ask for consent, and explain how to withdraw it.
Where we have legitimate interests in processing your data, we will carry out a ‘balancing test’ to make sure our processing does not infringe your interests, rights and freedoms. We will only use the data in ways that you would reasonably expect.
The legitimate interests we have are:
- Asking you for financial contributions towards the school, and facilitating this efficiently
- Analysing the composition of our alumni group to help us decide what events or activities to run
- Providing you with marketing communications based on what we think you’ll be interested in
In addition, we may process your personal data in order to comply with our legal obligations, such as our accounting and reporting requirements in relation to any donations received, and complying with our duties under equality legislation.
Less commonly, we may process alumni personal data in situations where:
- We need it to perform an official task in the public interest
- We need to protect someone’s vital interests (save your life, or someone else’s)
Some of the reasons listed above for collecting and using personal information about you overlap, and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your data.
Note 2: Legal basis for holding and processing sensitive personal data
- Ark Schools is under a legal obligation to hold and process the information.
- To fulfil our functions in providing schooling. This is a function which is in the public interest.