Privacy

Updated

On this page, you can find our privacy policy. For a child-friendly version, please access this page on our website, which we have written for children and young people.

Our commitments

1. We only use your data to provide you with our services and to improve your experience with us

  • We will never sell your personal data
  • We will never share your personal data, unless you give us permission or the law allows us to do so
  • We may use anonymised data for research or insights for the benefit of the education sector

2. We always respect your data choices

  • We will always be transparent about how we use your data, and give you control over how it is used
  • We will always communicate in plain English so that your choices are clear.

3. We always keep your data safe

  • We have systems in place to ensure your personal data is stored securely

4. We minimise data collected

  • We only collect the personal data we need to provide our service or make it better for you
  • We only keep your personal data for as long as it is needed or as long as we are required by law

We’re always mindful that many of our users are children and we add specific protections for any data received

1. Introduction

Oak National Academy Limited is committed to protecting and preserving the privacy of visitors to our website and other people with whom we communicate electronically (for example, by email). Under data protection law, individuals have a right to be informed about how we use any personal data which we hold about them. When we refer to "you" or "your" in this policy, we are referring to you as an individual visiting our website or communicating with us electronically. We refer to Oak National Academy Limited as “Oak”, "we", "our" or "us".

We comply with this right by providing this privacy policy. This policy sets out information about our collection and processing of personal information related to visitors to our website and other people with whom we communicate electronically. We also have separate privacy notices for our members of staff, contractors and suppliers and for our recruitment process.

We are the data controller for the purposes of data protection law.

Our Data Protection Officer (DPO) is Jayne Taylor.

This Privacy Notice should be read in conjunction with our Data Protection Policy, which is available by request from our DPO.

Our contact details

  • Name: Oak National Academy Limited
  • Address: Oak National Academy, PO Box 520, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 9GW
  • E-mail: [email protected]
  • Company Number: 14174888

2. The personal data we hold

The personal information that we will collect about you falls into the following categories:

Information collected automatically by our website

Our website collects some limited information about you automatically when you visit the site using your electronic device (this could be a computer desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, television). We do not seek to identify you from this information or do anything with it that will affect you individually. To the extent practicable, we aggregate and/or remove anything that could be used to identify you from this information before we use it, including (where possible) minimising the storage of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.

This information includes, or may in the future include:

  • the IP address from which you access our website;
  • information about the device used to access the site (including the number of pupils using it);
  • your approximate location;
  • your school;
  • the pages that you click on our site, including the lessons that you view (and therefore your likely year group);
  • the time that you spend on the site and the time that you spend viewing videos on the site;
  • the website uses cookies and web beacons. Please see the Oak Cookie Policy for full details.

Information that you input to our website

Some pages on our website invite you to input information about yourself – for example, where we invite you to sign up to receive an e-newsletter from us, or to provide feedback through a survey. In those cases the information sought is clear on the relevant page (usually your full name and email address).

We also ask teachers to input their school details (school name and URN) and school contact email address

on some pages, and, in particular, in order to download our resources.

Information that you send to us by email or other electronic means

You may also send us information about yourself by email or other electronic means: for example, through Facebook or X (Twitter). In that case we will record your name and basic contact details and, of course, the information that you include in your communication.

When we invite you to provide information about yourself, it is entirely up to you whether you give us the information or not. Often, however, we will not be able to do something that you are asking for (for example, send you an e-newsletter, or respond to an enquiry) if you do not give us the information.

Information collected through the Classroom

Users of the classroom.thenational.academy site are invited to take quizzes at the start and end of a lesson. The Classroom quizzes typically anonymously collect and store users’ answers, marks and total scores.

Information collected through the Feedback Tool

We use a third party (Hubspot and Gleap) feedback tool (widget) hosted on the website (www.thenational.academy) to enable users to submit a feedback form to report a technical bug or error in a lesson, make a general enquiry or to share product improvement ideas with us.

Gleap and Hubspot will process the following information about you:

  • Name (if you provided it)
  • Email address
  • Approximate geo-location
  • Operating system
  • Browser information (type and version)
  • Screen size
  • URL visited
  • Screenshot data
  • Session replay data (bug issue and lesson concern types only)

Information collected through the Recruitment Portal

We use a third-party tool (Applied) hosted within the website for managing our job adverts and all of our recruitment applications: jobs.thenational.academy

For details of how we handle personal data relating to recruitment, please see our Recruitment Privacy Notice.

Information collected through the Help Centre

Our Help centre (support.thenational.academy) hosted by a third party provider (Hubspot) allows us to offer users access to support documentation and FAQ articles, and to report an issue or feedback via a form.
Information about the cookies on the Help Centre can be accessed via the cookie banner or the cookie settings link near the footer on support.thenational.academy pages.

Hubspot will process the following information about you if you submit a form via the Help Centre:

  • Name (if you provided it)
  • Email address

3. Special category data

The information we hold is not normally classed as special category data. This includes any information relating to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, health, genetic or biometric data. If we do hold any such data about you, we will inform you.

4. Why we use this data

We use your personal information for the following purposes:

Information collected automatically by our website

We use this information to improve our website and the lessons and other materials that we provide through it. We do not use it to do anything that will affect you individually.

Information that you input to our website

The purposes for which we use this information (for example, to send you an e-newsletter) are explained on the web pages where we ask you to submit it. This may be to allow us to do the following:

  • to provide you with subscription services, such as email updates
  • to understand how our services are being used and help us improve the resources we create
  • to ensure that our educational content is reaching the intended audience
  • to allow us to know where our materials are being used
  • to allow you to opt into updates relating to the site
  • to allow us to invite you to share your views on how to improve Oak and the services it provides.

Information that you send to us by email or other electronic means

We use this information to communicate with you, to respond to any enquiries that you may raise, and to manage our relationship with you.

Information collected through the Classroom

We use this information to help drive motivation in the users and to inform our continuous improvement of the content of our lessons.

Information collected through the Feedback Tool

We use this information to:

  • Allow us to contact you to seek clarity on the issue you report
  • Enable us to update you when an issue is resolved
  • Add contextual detail to manually submitted feedback
  • Enable analysis of feedback items

Information collected through the Recruitment Portal

We use this information to allow us to select candidates to take forward for interview.

Your personal information also forms part of a record of the conduct of our programme, the delivery of our lessons and our relationships with visitors to our website. We use these records to oversee and assess our programme and derive insights for the education sector. The records may also in some circumstances be used as evidence of these various matters, should a disagreement arise.

We may share in anonymised form only, aggregated records of usage with the Department for Education, and third party education research organisations.

We will not sell or rent your personal information or use or share your personal information for marketing purposes (other than to send you our e-newsletter, with your consent).

We may need to use or disclose your personal information in order to comply with our legal obligations.

Information collected through the Help centre

We use this information to:

  • Understand usage of our support articles so that we can improve our documentation
  • Learn what support topics users are searching for, to help identify gaps in our knowledge base and opportunities to create missing content
  • Allow us to contact you to seek clarity on the issue you report
  • Enable us to update you when an issue is resolved
  • Enable analysis of feedback items

5. Our legal basis for using this data

We only collect and use personal data when the law allows us to. As set out above, we will not sell or rent your personal information or use or share your personal information for marketing purposes (other than to send you our e-newsletter, with your consent).

We may need to use or disclose your personal information in order to comply with our legal obligations.

We may seek your consent to allow us to process your personal information – for example, if you ask us to send you an e-newsletter, we may ask for your consent to use your contact details in order to send you the e-newsletter. Personal information we collect through the Recruitment Portal is only collected using your consent. If we are relying on your consent, you can withdraw your consent at any time. We will make this clear when we ask for consent and explain how it can be withdrawn.

Generally, however, we need to collect and process your personal information, to the limited extent described in this privacy notice, so that we can pursue our legitimate interests in:

  • delivering our programme of video lessons, including administering, managing and improving the programme, deriving insights from the programme for the educational sector and resolving any related legal issues that may arise; and
  • (if you submit information to our website or send us information by email or other electronic means) communicating with you, responding to your enquiries and managing our relationship with you, all as part of delivering and improving that programme.

6. Collecting this data

Most of the personal information we hold about you comes from you directly, either via our website, through our communications and interactions with you, such as email.

Whenever we seek to collect information from you, we make it clear whether providing it is mandatory or optional. If it is mandatory, we will explain the possible consequences of not complying.

In some cases (for example, when we host webinars), we may ask you to provide some personal information via a third party. We will always ensure that these third parties have appropriate safeguards in place to ensure your personal information is kept safe and secure.

7. How we store this data

We are committed to doing all we can to keep your personal information safe and secure. We have set up systems and processes to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure of your information. We also make sure that any third parties that process your information on our behalf keep your personal information secure.

We use encrypted drives to store information; we limit access to only those who need access; we keep a record of data access and modification for records on our systems; we manage and restrict all devices which have access to Oak systems or services.

We will delete your personal information when we no longer need it in order to manage and deliver, or as a record of, our programme or (where relevant) our relationship with you. In particular, unless we need to keep information for longer because (for example) a dispute arises:

  • information about your visits to our website will be held for up to 5 years after the start of each session
  • email newsletter subscription information will be held until you cease to subscribe, or the email newsletter is no longer published, and then for 5 years and then deleted
  • we retain emails and other electronic communications for 5 years after they are sent or received, and then delete them.
  • we retain data collected via the Feedback Tool for a period of 12 months and then delete it.

Further details about how long we retain records can be found in our Retention of Records Policy.

8. Data sharing

We do not share information about you with any third party without consent unless the law, our policies or the terms of this privacy notice allow us to do so.

Your personal information may be shared with third party service providers who host and process your information on our behalf in order to support our programme.

These third parties include, but are not limited to:

  • Gleap (feedback)
  • Hubspot (analytics and email communications)
  • Incycle (customer data management)
  • PostHog (analytics)
  • Bugsnag (platform monitoring).
  • Zapier (integrations between other software and services).

We share aggregated information about the use of our website with partners but this does not involve disclosure of information from which you could be identified.

We may also need to disclose your personal information in order to protect our legal rights and comply with our legal obligations.

9. Transferring data internationally

Oak uses a range of services to ensure it can deliver fast and reliable video streaming to all its users. The majority of Oak’s technology is based within the European Economic Area and is fully compliant with the EU GDPR laws. However, some of the services we use are based outside the UK and the European Economic Area. We only use these services where we are satisfied with their levels of security and we will put contractual safeguards in place. Keep in mind that when you give us personal information it could be being transferred, stored or processed in a location outside the UK and the EEA.

10. Individual’s rights regarding personal data

Individuals have a right to make a ‘subject access request’ to gain access to personal information that we hold about them.

If you make a subject access request, and if we do hold information about you, we will:

  • Give you a description of it;
  • Tell you why we are holding and processing it, and how long we will keep it for;
  • Explain where we got it from, if not from you or your child;
  • Tell you who it has been, or will be, shared with;
  • Let you know whether any automated decision-making is being applied to the data, and any consequences of this;
  • Give you a copy of the information in an intelligible form.

Individuals also have the right for their personal information to be transmitted electronically to another organisation in certain circumstances.

If you would like to make a request please contact our Data Protection Officer.

Other rights

Under data protection law, individuals have certain rights regarding how their personal data is used and kept safe, including the right to:

  • Object to the use of personal data if it would cause, or is causing, damage or distress;
  • Prevent it being used to send direct marketing;
  • Object to decisions being taken by automated means (by a computer or machine, rather than by a person). Currently we do not carry out any automated decision making or profiling on the personal data we process. If this changes then we will let you know and update this Notice accordingly;
  • In certain circumstances, have inaccurate personal data corrected, deleted or destroyed, or restrict processing;
  • Request the transfer of automated personal data to them or to a third party. We will provide personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format;
  • Withdraw their consent at any time where we are processing personal data on the lawful basis of consent (for example when you receive our e-newsletter);
  • Claim compensation for damages caused by a breach of the data protection regulations.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact our DPO.

11. Complaints

We take any complaints about our collection and use of personal information very seriously.

If you think that our collection or use of personal information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate, or have any other concern about our data processing, please raise this with us in the first instance.

To make a complaint, please contact our DPO.

Alternatively, you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

  • Report a concern online at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/
  • Call 0303 123 1113
  • Or write to: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

12. Contacting us

If you have any questions, concerns or would like more information about anything mentioned in this privacy notice, please contact our DPO:

  • Name: Jayne Taylor
  • Address: Oak National Academy, PO Box 520, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 9GW
  • Email: [email protected]

This Notice

We will update this Privacy Notice from time to time. Any substantial changes that affect your rights will be provided to you directly as far as is reasonably practicable.