GDPR - Privacy Notice for Alumni, Supporters and Benefactors
Policy no: 15
Version: 2 Date: October 2023
Date of review: October 2025
Rationale
Holywood Steiner School values the relationships with all its alumni and supporters. We aim to build links with our global community of former Holywood Steiner pupils and offer a range of social and community events. Your involvement in the School can help to rekindle friendships at reunions and provide opportunities for current pupils through our careers and development programmes.
Holywood Steiner School is the data controller of the personal information we hold about our Alumni, volunteers, pupils, and their parents/families/carers/legal guardians. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use the personal information which we collect. UK Data Protection Act, 2018, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy laws, that apply in the countries from which our pupils come.
We are required under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.
This Privacy Notice explains how the School collects, manages, and uses the personal data of alumni and supporters. The statement also explains how you can change the way/s in which we use your personal data at any time. Your personal data will be stored securely in the School’s Alumni and Development database. Your personal data will not be disclosed to external organisations other than those acting as agents for the School on alumni projects and fundraising activities.
This notice applies to prospective, current, and former pupils and their families/carers/legal guardians and those applying for a place at the school and their families/carers/legal guardians. We may update this notice at any time but if we do so, we will inform you as soon as reasonably practicable.
It is important that you read and retain this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information and what your rights are under GDPR.
If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle personal information, please contact the Headteacher who will deal with your query
The Headteacher can be contacted by email at admin@holywood-steiner.co.uk or by phone on, 028 90 428029 or in writing at Holywood Steiner School, 34 Croft Road, Holywood BT18 OPR.
Our Data Protection Officer is the Finance and Admin Officer, and they monitor the school’s data protection procedures to ensure they meet the standards and requirements of the GDPR]. Please contact Sonia Devenney, Data Protection Officer at admin@holywood-steiner.co.uk
You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.
The ICO’s details are as follows:
The Information Commissioner’s Office – Northern Ireland
3rd Floor
14 Cromac Place,
Belfast BT7 2JB
Telephone: 028 9027 8757 / 0303 123 1114
Email: ni@ico.org.uk
Why we collect your information.
Through better understanding of our alumni community, we can tailor our communications and events to be more relevant to you depending on your chosen communication preferences, where you live, your occupation or if you are retired. Some examples of why we process your data and may contact you are as follows:
To invite you to meetings, events, or reunions
To keep you updated on School news through publications, social media, or newsletters
To ask for your help as a mentor or volunteer e.g., for reunions, events, and careers programme
To carry out the charitable purposes and development of the School
To ensure we meet requirements in terms of record-keeping, e.g., Gift Aid Declarations
To seek your opinion via surveys
How your personal data is collected.
The School holds data collected during your relationship and contact with the School as a pupil, supporter, donor, event attendee and alumnus/a. Pupil data is transferred to the Alumni and Development database upon pupil leaving school. The School relies upon the legitimate purposes condition to use your personal data to register you as School alumni. The legitimate purpose is to maintain a lifelong relationship with our pupils.
From 2022, we will ask our Class 11 Leavers to complete a consent form at the point of leaving.
You provided your data to us when you:
Updated your details either in person or online.
Completed and returned forms such as Update Your Details forms, Gift forms and Gift Aid Declarations
Communicated with the Business Development Manager or Fundraiser.
Registered to attend an Event or Reunion via the School Office
Updates to your personal data are made from the information you supply to us via communications, events, and forms, and to other staff at the School.
The School aims to keep your personal data as up to date as possible and will ask you to update them through various projects and communications. Some of the data may have been obtained from publicly available sources online.
Publicly Available Information
We may collect information from third party sources such as newspapers, social media, company registers, public bodies, and the internet.
What personal data we hold and how we use it
We maintain a record of all former pupils of the School.
The data we hold include:
your preferences about how we contact you and for which purposes, or if you have told us that you do not wish any further contact from the School
name, title, gender, date of birth.
contact details (addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, social media links).
education information.
occupation details, such as employer, as well as professional associations you hold, information about your time at the School, including interests, extracurricular activitieszand charity and community involvement.
family details and your relationships/connections to other alumni, supporters, and friends.
records of donations and Gift Aid status, where applicable (as required by HMRC).
records of communications sent to you by Alumni and Development and received from you.
media articles and information sourced about you from 3rd parties.
information on your engagement in School meetings, events, volunteering, groups or networks.
The School holds your data for alumni relations and fundraising purposes, which include the following:
School publications and news to keep alumni and supporters in touch.
professional, social, and corporate events for alumni and supporters.
fundraising programmes which raise funds for the School.
alumni volunteering opportunities, such as mentoring pupils, giving talks to pupils,
providing case studies and quotes for marketing publications to inspire pupils.
As a charity we may be obliged to carry out due diligence on larger gifts made to the School. This may involve obtaining and recording your personal information from publicly available sources.
The School may contact alumni and supporters via the methods below:
Mail
Email
Telephone
Social Media
When you complete an online and/or printed Update Form, you give your consent to being contacted by us by certain methods and for certain purposes.Your data may be shared with other School staff (unless you have requested otherwise) in order to send communications, invitations, and information about alumni relations and fundraising activities of potential interest to alumni, donors, and supporters.
We value our relationship with you, and we use your personal data to ensure we contact you in the most appropriate way, improve our services and to ensure we work efficiently and effectively. On that basis, we may also use your personal data or information from publicly available sources to carry out research to assess your inclination and capacity to support the School financially through fundraising activity, to send you communications or by volunteering your time. This research may include collecting data relating to you that is in the public domain (such as career history, directorships, your assets, shareholdings, charitable affiliations, and remuneration) as well as data that have been provided by you including your interests and School activity you have previously been involved in.
The School is committed to ensuring that it fundraises in a transparent, ethical, responsible, and honest way.
How we keep your data safe
The School ensures that there are appropriate technical controls in place to protect your personal details. A limited number of trained staff have access to the Alumni and Development. database.
The School may share your personal data with agents and partners that conduct contractual services on its behalf. These include mailing houses to send you direct mail and fundraising mailings. Alumni and Development only share data for these purposes after completing a service contract and non-disclosure agreement that ensures a secure data processing arrangement and that your data are held confidentially and securely. These companies are only allowed to use your data in accordance with strict instructions and for the agreed purpose.
The School never sells your personal data to third parties or external companies. Although most of the information we store and process stays within the UK, some information may be transferred to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA). This may occur if, for example, one of our trusted partner’s servers are in a country outside the EEA. Where these countries do not have similar data protection laws to the UK, we will take steps to make sure they provide an adequate level of protection in accordance with UK data protection law.
Keeping your data up to date
Where possible we use publicly available sources to keep your records up to date. The School ask alumni to update details whenever they change via communications.
Your data rights
We wish to build lasting relationships with our alumni community and will retain at least minimal information of your name, DOB, and class years. However, we appreciate that some members of our community may wish to restrict data processing or prefer not to be contacted, in which case please let us know. Please note that this minimal information is always retained but is suppressed in our records to ensure that you are not contacted inadvertently.
You can withdraw your consent to any of the above communications at any point by contacting us. You have a range of rights in relation to your personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation. These rights include being able to request corrections, erasure, and access to your personal data and that the processing of your personal data stops or is restricted for certain purposes.
Your rights of access, correction, erasure, and restriction
Under GDPR, pupils/parents/families and carers have the right to request access to information about them that we hold. To make a request for your personal information, or be given access to your child’s educational record, contact the Headteacher at admin@holywood-steiner.co.uk
We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.
Request access to personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and your child and to check that we are lawfully processing it. You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.
Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you and your child. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold corrected.
Request erasure of personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
Object to processing of personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or that of a third party) and there is something about your situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing you and your child’s personal information for direct marketing purposes.
You can also contact the School’s Data Protection Officer about the processing of your personal data, including if you have concerns about the use of your data or wish to discuss how to exercise your rights. The School’s Data Protection Officer Sonia Devenney can be contacted at admin@holywood-steiner.co.uk.
Changes to this Privacy Notice
This Data Protection Privacy Notice may be updated from time to time. If we make significant changes in the way we manage your personal data, we will update this web page and/or inform you directly.
This policy will be annually reviewed by the Headteacher and the Data Protection Officer.