Privacy policy

This policy explains what happens to information about you when you use this site or ask us about a course. It is written in the order you meet us: what you give us, why we need it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can make us do about it.

What we hold, and when we got it

Most of what we hold, you typed. An enquiry form asks for a name, an email address, usually a phone number, and a short description of what you have studied and what you are looking for. The eligibility check asks about grades and an English score. Neither asks for anything it does not need to answer you.

Two things arrive without being typed. The first is the ordinary record any web server keeps of a page being served - the address it went to, roughly where in the world that is, and what browser asked for it. The second is what cookies do, which has a policy of its own next to this one.

We do not buy lists. If we are writing to you, it is because you wrote to us first.

Why we hold it

To answer the question you asked. An adviser reads what you sent, checks it against the entry requirements of departments that might fit, and replies. That is the whole of the ordinary case, and the legal basis for it is that you asked us to do something for you.

Where we write to you about something you did not ask about - an open day, a deadline moving, a piece we have published - we do that only if you told us we could, and every one of those messages carries a link that stops them. Stopping them does not affect anything you have asked us to do.

We also keep enough of a record to run the office: who enquired, what was said, what happened next. That is how an adviser picking up a conversation six months later knows what was already answered.

Who else sees it

A university sees your details when you ask us to make an application to it, and not before. We will tell you which institutions we are approaching and what we are sending. If you tell us to stop, we stop.

Beyond that, the only others who touch it are the companies that run the things this office runs on - the email service, the website host, the file storage. They act on our instructions and cannot use it for anything of their own.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not trade it for placement fees, referral bonuses or anything else. If that ever changed, this page would say so before it happened.

Where it is kept

On servers inside the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area wherever we can choose, and under the safeguards the law requires where a supplier operates elsewhere. Applying to a British university necessarily means sending your details to Britain, which is the point of the exercise.

How long we keep it

An enquiry that goes nowhere is deleted after two years. Two, rather than one, because a student who asks in the sixth form often comes back after A-levels and would rather not start again.

Where we have made an application for you, the file is kept for six years after the last thing that happened on it. That is the period in which a question about what was submitted can still be asked, and answering it needs the file.

Anything we are told to keep longer by a law or a regulator, we keep for exactly as long as that requires and no longer.

What you can make us do

You can ask to see everything we hold about you, and we will send it within a month. You can ask us to correct anything that is wrong, which is worth doing before an application rather than after. You can ask us to delete it, and we will unless we are holding it for one of the reasons above, in which case we will tell you which and for how long.

You can also ask us to stop using it for something while a disagreement is sorted out, ask for it in a form you can hand to somebody else, and object to us using it at all. None of these costs anything and none of them needs a reason.

If you think we have got this wrong, tell us first and we will try to fix it. If that does not settle it, a complaint can go to the supervisory authority for data protection in the country you live in.

Children

Students under eighteen are a normal part of this work, and there is a separate policy on how we deal with them. In short: we ask for a parent or guardian to be part of the conversation, and we do not hold more about a young person than the application needs.

Changes to this policy

When this changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Where a change affects what we do with information we already hold, we will write to the people it affects rather than rely on anybody noticing a date.