Privacy notice for student inclusion

We collect most personal information directly from you when you contact and or register with the University’s Disability Support Team including online, by phone, email, or in person.

We may collect the following types of personal data about you:

• Personal details such as name, address, date of birth, phone number, your BCU ID number,
• Information about your personal circumstances and the support and assistance you have been provided such as funding you are in receipt of or may be entitled to
• Details of the interactions you have had with the Team, other areas of the University, and external agencies, where relevant
• Bookings, including for events and / or support sessions.

We may also process the following "special categories" of more sensitive personal data:

• Information about your health, including any disability and/or medical condition.

We will use your personal data to administer your support, deliver services and meet statutory obligations.

We store your personal data on IT systems. The providers of those IT systems are data processors. They only process personal data on our behalf and not for their own use. Other than that, we will not share your personal information with anyone outside of the relevant departments, services and faculties within BCU unless one of the following statements apply:

• We have your explicit consent
• It is required or permitted by law in which case we will only share the minimum amount necessary

• The University is required to offer a support service to meet our commitments to you as set out in the student contract
• Maintaining records of the sessions are necessary to ensure the University is providing the appropriate support
• In specific circumstances we may seek your consent to process your personal data
• In rare circumstances the University may need to release information to protect your interests or the interests of others, e.g. in a medical emergency.

BCU is committed to safeguarding your personal data. Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use your information in line with all applicable laws concerning the protection of personal information, including the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation. In relation to all our records these are held within a dedicated and secure database system hosted on a secure network with access limited on a need-to-know basis.

A range of administrative, technical, physical security controls are used to ensure a robust approach to protecting data held on University IT systems, and when approved transfers between third parties are undertaken. For more information a copy of BCU’s overarching Data Protection Policy is available on the policies page of the BCU website.

Personal data is held for different lengths of time in accordance with the purpose of processing the personal data. We will hold your personal information in line with the University’s data retention schedule.

BCU wants to ensure that we keep the details we hold about you up to date and communicate with you fully in accordance with your wishes. You should also get in touch with us if any of your personal details change. You can update your details and your communication preferences during enrolment tasks, by contacting Academic Services or at any time:

By email to: informationmanagement@bcu.ac.uk

By telephone: 0121 202 4597

By post to:

Data Protection Officer
Information Management Team
Birmingham City University
1st Floor, Joseph Priestley Building
6 Cardigan Street
Birmingham B4 7BD

Under the Data Protection Laws, you have the following rights:

• to your data (commonly known as a “subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of your data and to check that we are lawfully processing it;
• of your data. This enables you to ask us to correct any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you.
• of your data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove your data in certain circumstances, for example, if you consider that there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your data where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
• of your data where we are relying on our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your data for direct marketing purposes.
• of your data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your data, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• of your data to another party

Depending on the circumstances and the nature of your request it may not be possible for us to do what you have asked, for example, where there is a statutory or contractual requirement for us to process your data and it would not be possible to fulfil our legal obligations if we were to stop.

However, where you have consented to the processing (for example, where you have asked us to send you certain types of communication), you can withdraw your consent at any time, by emailing us at informationmanagement@bcu.ac.uk.

In this event, we will stop the processing as soon as we can. If you choose to withdraw consent it will not invalidate past processing and it may impact our ability to provide particular additional services to you. Further information on your rights is available from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

If you wish to exercise any of your rights, please contact our Data Protection Officer using the following contact details.

By email to: informationmanagement@bcu.ac.uk

By telephone: 0121 202 4597

By post to:

Data Protection Officer
Information Management Team
Birmingham City University 3 Floor
Joseph Priestley Building
6 Cardigan Street
Birmingham
B4 7BD

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about how we use or handle your personal data please contact the Data Protection Officer using the contact details in section 11 above.

If you are not content with the how we handle your information we would ask you to contact our Data Protection Officer to help you. However, you do also have the right to complain directly to the Information Commissioner at: ICO website – Make a complaint or via post at: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Information about the Information Commissioner is available at: Information Commissioner’s Office website.

This privacy notice may be updated from time to time so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to BCU. The date of the most recent versions will appear on this page (see version control).

We encourage you to check our privacy notice from time to time to ensure you understand how your data will be used and to see any minor updates. If material changes are made to the privacy notice, for instance how we would like to use your personal data, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification or correspondence of privacy notice changes). We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal data.