Privacy notice for access programmes

The UCL Access and Widening Participation Office (AWPO) respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data.

• Introduction 
• About us 
• Personal data that we collect about you and how we process it
• Who we share your personal data with 
• Lawful bases for processing 
• International transfers
• Information security
• Data retention
• Your rights
• Further Information
• Complaints

Introduction

Please read this Privacy Notice carefully – it describes why and how we collect and use your personal data and provides information about your rights.

It applies to personal data provided to us, both by individuals themselves or by third parties, and supplements the following UCL privacy notices:

• General privacy notice
• Student privacy notice
• Prospective students privacy notice
• Privacy notice for under 13s

We keep this Privacy Notice under regular review. It was last updated August 2023.

About us

AWPO is part of the Student and Registry Services professional services department at UCL.

UCL, a company incorporated by Royal Charter (number RC 000631), is the entity that determines how and why your personal data is processed. This means that UCL is the ‘controller’ of your personal data for the purposes of data protection law.

Personal data that we collect about you and how we process it

Personal data or personal information means any information about an individual which can be used to identify that person.

AWPO collects, uses, stores and transfers personal data about applicants in order to run programmes and understand how well they work. We also communicate with our past participants to let them know about other relevant programmes.

Specifically, data gathered is used to:

• Select prospective students, teachers and parents, for participation on programmes based on UCL’s targeting criteria
• Administer access programmes
• Assess your eligibility for UCL’s contextual admissions schemes
• Monitor and evaluate programmes
• Communicate and promote activities to past participants and individuals from target groups
• Track progression of AWPO student participants to higher education and beyond
• Report outcomes of access programmes internally as well as to the higher education regulator the Office for Students (OfS), the HE sector and more widely.

The categories of personal data that are collected and the purposes for which they are used are summarised in tables below.

Table 1: Data collected and stored from prospective students and the purposes for which they are used:

Table 2: Data collected and stored from teachers and the purposes for which they are used:

Note that we will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us.

If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Who we share your personal data with

Your personal data will be collected and processed primarily by AWPO staff and UCL. Access to your personal information is limited to staff who have a legitimate need to see it for the purpose of carrying out their job at UCL.

Specifically, AWPO shares data with:

1. UCL professional services teams, academic departments and research centres to deliver access programmes
2. Your school or college to collaboratively deliver access programmes
3. The Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) and its members for tracking and profiling student participants
4. Higher education institutions for joint research and evaluation projects
5. Other organisations, including charities and education authorities, to collaboratively deliver programmes
6. If you apply to UCL we may share your data with our admissions department to assess your eligibility for UCL contextual admissions
7. If you enrol at UCL we may share your data with UCL professional services to provide you with information about relevant services and support

8. Third party organisations for programme delivery logistics, for example to post materials to participants.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow third parties to use your personal data for their own purposes – we will only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions, as set out in data sharing agreements.

Lawful basis for processing

AWPO relies on the following lawful bases of processing personal data under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018:

Public Task: UCL is required by an act of parliament (the Higher Education and Research Act 2017) to run programmes as part of a mandatory access and participation plan submitted to the statutory higher education regulator, the OfS. UCL will be processing personal data in its capacity as a public authority in relation to the administration, monitoring and evaluation of programmes.

In addition to the administration, monitoring and evaluation of programmes, AWPO also processes your personal data on the lawful basis of public task in the following ways:

1. We use personal contact details to communicate with past participants and other target groups to promote activities and programmes
2. We may use photographs and videos recorded during our programmes on our website, in promotional materials or in reports
3. We share your data with our admissions team and other UCL professional services to assess your eligibility for contextual admissions and targeted UCL services and support
4. We may contact your teacher to update them about your progress on the programme.

We do not transfer your personal data outside the United Kingdom (UK).

Information security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have established procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

We will keep your personal data according to the UCL Records Retention Schedule and HEAT retention policy, as outlined in the HEAT Privacy Notice.

Your rights

Subject to certain conditions, under data protection legislation you have the following rights:

• Right to be informed how your data is being used; the information above should tell you everything you need to know, but I you have any questions you can contact us on wp-data@ucl.ac.uk
• Right to request a copy of your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request or DSAR).  If you would like to make a request, please see the Data Protection page on subject access requests
• Right to request correction of your personal data (we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us);
• Right to request erasure of your personal data [WK1] 
• Right to request restriction of the processing your personal data e.g. to ask that it’s archived and not used further
• Right to ask  us to transfer personal data to another organisation
• Right to object to our processing of personal data held by us about you. 
• Right to ask us not to use information about you in a way that allows computers to make decisions about you and ask us to stop.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact the AWPO team by emailing us on wp-data@ucl.ac.uk.

Further Information

If you have a question about how your data is used, you can contact the AWPO team by emailing us on wp-data@ucl.ac.uk.

For further information relating to Child Protection, please see our Child protection and safeguarding policy.

You can also contact UCL by telephoning +44 (0)20 7679 2000 or by writing to: University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT.

Please note that UCL has appointed a Data Protection Officer. If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact them using the details set out below:

Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer: data-protection@ucl.ac.uk

Complaints

If you wish to complain about our use of personal data, please send an email with the details of your complaint to the Data Protection Officer so that we can look into the issue and respond to you.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) (the UK data protection regulator).  For further information on your rights and how to complain to the ICO, please refer to the ICO website.