Students Privacy Notice
What is the Greater Manchester Apprenticeship and Careers Service?
This website helps young people explore and design their next steps before leaving school. You can learn more about opportunities open to you and apply for courses and jobs.
The website is part of a careers programme which supports schools, colleges and students across Greater Manchester.
Who provides the Greater Manchester Apprenticeship and Careers Service?
The website is provided by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and delivered through CASCAID LTD.
Data controller
If you have any questions about how your data (information) is stored, please contact the GMCA Data Protection Officer: OfficeofDPO@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk
How do we collect your data?
We collect your data in three ways.
- Data provided by your school
Your school will provide data about you to set up your account. This includes student ID, first name, last name, gender and date of birth. It also includes your student email address, your school, your year group, and your school for next year
- Data provided by you
You can add data about yourself to the website. This includes email address, phone number, mailing address, personal picture, education goals, interests, skills, test scores, work and volunteer experiences, plans for the future and personal achievements.
- Data collected through the website
We use cookies to track site use and to improve our service. A cookie is a simple text file stored on your device. Cookies remember data from your visit to this website but cannot be read by other websites.
This includes the pages you view, the links you click, time spent on the website, how you use the website over time, and any other actions you take.
We also collect data to track general usage trends. This data is not linked to you personally.
This may include your web request, Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, browser type, device type, number of clicks, how you interact with links on the website and pages viewed.
We do not allow any third-party advertising networks to collect data about you. We will not sell your data. We will not share or give your data to anyone else, except as described in this notice.
Things we use to collect data through the website
We use five main tools to help make our website work:
- Heap Analytics: to improve the website
- Atatus, Google Analytics, Hotjar: to monitor website performance
- Facebook: to support storage of achievements. No data is shared except photos and videos you choose to save.
Data collected by these tools is anonymous so is not linked to you personally.
About Hotjar
We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices. This includes a device’s IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.
For further details, please see the ‘about Hotjar’ section of Hotjar’s support site.
Changing your cookie settings
You can change your device settings at any time to accept all cookies, to tell you when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies. How you do this depends on your browser.
Find out more at: AboutCookies.org
Where your cookie data is stored
To find out where your cookie data is stored, see the services we use:
- Heap Analytics
- Atatus
- Google Analytics
- Hotjar
These services all comply with the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks.
How your data will be used
We will use your data so you can:
- apply for training or education opportunities
- apply for other opportunities, including work placements and jobs
And so we can:
- comply with the law
- investigate complaints
- maintain our accounts and records
- promote our services
- fix technical problems
- evaluate the service
- improve and plan future services
We may publish reports using anonymised data. The reports will not identify you or any other individual users.
Do we share your data with anyone?
We will share your data with selected organisations and partners:
- organisations you choose. This is so you can apply for courses and opportunities. If you apply for an opportunity then that organisation will receive your application details.
- your school. This helps your teachers track your progress, communicate with you, and help get you work-ready. They can see your profile and how you use the website, such as your completed lessons and activities. Only staff supporting you can see your data.
- your local authority. Local authorities have a legal duty to provide data to the Department for Education and we will provide reports to them to support this.
Legal reason for using your data
As a public authority, we have a legal responsibility to provide services to residents. We also help local authorities and schools in Greater Manchester to meet their legal duties. Under the law, we must have a clear reason to use your data and for the Greater Manchester Apprenticeship and Careers Service these are:
- for a contract we have with you (contract)
- to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions which have a clear basis in law (public task)
- to ensure the equality of treatment or to perform a task for our official functions, which have a clear basis in law (substantial public interests)
Keeping your data safe
Your data will be kept safe. We hold your data on secure servers in line with security best practice. Our developers CASCAID must keep your data safe as part of their contract. To do this they comply with a number of data security standards. Any data we share about you will be done so securely. Applications to colleges and training providers are sent via secure email systems. Your school can only access the website via a secure log-in. Other people viewing your data will only see what they need.
How long will we keep your data?
We will keep this data until the end of the school year when you turn 16. At this time, you will be sent an email asking if you want to keep your account. If you do not reply or do not wish to keep your account, we will close your account and delete your data.
Once you are 16, if you do not use your account within a 12-month period you will also get an email. Again, if you do not reply or do not want to keep your account, we will close your account and delete your data. The information that we hold to improve and evaluate our service is held as statistical data. This means that we are not able to identify individual people from this data.
Transferring your data outside of the European Union (EU) Your data will not be stored outside of the EU.
Decisions using your data
All decisions made about you linked to the website are made by a person, such as a teacher or careers adviser. The website may give you ideas and suggestions based on your data but will not make decisions.
Your data rights
You have various data rights. You can:
- ask for copies of your data
- raise concerns if you think your data is not being used or looked after in the right way
- make sure your data is accurate and up-to-date
- ask for a copy of your data in a digital format, for example as a csv file. You can also ask for your data to be transferred to another organisation.
You can view and amend your own account and profile information yourself on the website. If for any reason you cannot see or change your data via your account, we will try our best to help. We will not be able to do this in some cases. For example, if data relates to other people. Please email OfficeofDPO@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk and include:
- your full name, address and telephone number
- details of the request you would like us to action
To make a query or a complaint
If you feel your data is not being used correctly, please contact your school first. If you are not happy doing this, you can email:
OfficeofDPO@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk
Or write to:
Data Protection Office
GMCA
Broadhurst House
56 Oxford Street
Manchester
M1 6EU
Please say you are asking about the use of your data within the Greater Manchester Apprenticeship and Careers Service.
You can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you think ICO rules or laws have been broken. Visit the Information Commissioner’s Office website for more details.
We may track and record communication (internet, email and telephone calls) with us to help sort out complaints. This also helps us to prevent and detect crime.
