Privacy Statement

By using this website you accept the terms of this privacy statement, the copyright statement and the terms and conditions on this website.

Our commitment to privacy

This privacy statement explains how Ufi Limited (referred to as "we", "us" or "learndirect") collects information from you via the website or in any manner expressly described in the privacy statement and how this information is then used. When you provide us with your personal data you consent to us processing all such personal data as set out in the privacy statement. Please read this privacy statement carefully and revisit this page from time to time to review any changes that we may have made. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about about how we handle your personal information, please ring us on 0800 101 901 or email us.

Follow the hyperlinks below for more information about our policies and practices in relation to your personal data.

Giving information for other people

When you give us information about another person, the other person must have agreed to let :

us process all their personal data; and
you receive any data protection notices for them.

When you send information for someone else, you are confirming that you have told them :

which data they must give;
which information is voluntary; and
how they can access and, if necessary, correct the data we hold about them.

The information we collect during the enrolment process

When you enrol with us, you (or the person enrolling you) must tell us :

your full name;
your gender
your date of birth;
your address (and correspondence address if different);
primary telephone number;
your employment status;
where you heard about us;
if you have done any learning in the last three years.

We also request other information including your title, middle name, email address,National Insurance number and if you are a Welsh speaker, but you don't have to give us these details. Following enrolment via the website, we, or our approved learning providers, may request additional personal data from you in order to further support your learning. You do not have to provide this information, but if you do not, you may not get the most out of your learning. However, we ask you to tell us whether you have achieved Level 2 in English and Maths.

Please note that when you enrol on a learndirect course that leads to qualification such as an NVQ, we send non sensitive personal information to the relevant awarding bodies so that they can undertake the administration associated with your qualification.

Before you enrol, we will give you a username and ask you for a password. You will also be given a learner reference number and asked to give the answer to a question you choose which will identify you.

Other information we collect to see if you can have government funding

If government funding is available for any of our courses, you need to answer some other questions to see if you are eligible for funding. If you wish to take advantage of any such funding, you will be asked about :

your age;
your education so far;
your citizenship status; and
where you live and how long you have lived there.

We, or our approved learning providers, may require additional information from you in order to support an application for funding. If you do not want to provide us with this information, we will not be able to offer you the course at the reduced price.

The information we collect when you access course materials

We collect information about how you use course materials to monitor your learning and improve our users' learning experience.

The information we collect when you enter competitions

From time to time we may run competitions and promotions on the website. If you enter these, we may ask for your name, address, email address and username so that we can administer and control the competition and, of course, notify the winners.

Other information we collect

If you require a free information pack, we ask you to provide us with the information on the "request more information" form on the website, including :

Title;
Full name;
Full address;
An indication of courses in which you are interested;
Whether you would like to know where your nearest learndirect centres are;
Where you heard about us.

You can also decide to give us your home and mobile telephone numbers and your email address but you only need to do this if you want us and/or our approved learning providers to contact you about learndirect developments and offers in this way.

If you are not registered as a learndirect learner but use one of our online tests to test your skills, we ask you to provide your full name and email address. This information is not retained by us but is used only when sending you your test results.
You may also provide personal data through:

calls to our helplines;
letters and email;
customer feedback forms;

* We may record calls to helplines for quality and training purposes only. We will store calls for about three months and we will keep them confidential. In general, if you contact us, we may keep a record of your query or complaint for a reasonable time in case you contact us again.

Sensitive personal data

Sensitive personal data includes details of your :

race or ethnic origin
political opinions
religious or other beliefs
trade-union membership
physical or mental health
sexual life; or
criminal record (including information about criminal proceedings and suspected criminal activities).

At or before enrolment you may be asked for sensitive personal information but you do not have to provide it. Where we invite you to provide such information, we will ask you to consent to our proposed uses of such data. If you do not wish to provide this information you may select the "Not Known/Not Provided" option.

You may also volunteer sensitive personal data to us or our approved learning providers, for example, when you submit a query or comment to us via the website or some other means of communication. If you do so, you explicitly consent to our using such information as described in this Privacy Statement.

How we use the information we collect

We use your personal information:

to answer your queries or complaints;
to deliver our services, for example on-line tools to test your skills;
to support your learning;
to provide course materials;
to carry out administration;
for general statistics and research;
for obtaining any relevant professional advice;
as may be required by law or in connection with legal proceedings (including where we intend to take legal proceedings), or as may be necessary to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.

Third parties and sponsors

To achieve the purposes set out in this privacy statement we may need to give your information to our service providers (including our approved learning providers), agents, professional advisors and auditors and to your tutor(s). When you enrol on a course, we will tell you which of our approved learning providers will be delivering and supporting your learning. Following enrolment via the website, all of our approved learning providers will have access to your name, date of birth, address, username, learner reference number and which learndirect courses you have enrolled on in the past as well as details relating to these learndirect courses to help us deliver our services to you.

We may also give your information to third parties who may take over part or all of the learndirect business in the future, but only for the purposes outlined in this privacy statement. If your employer, trade organisation or other group is sponsoring you, we may give the personal information we have collected to your sponsor to monitor your learning.

Communications between you and your tutor using any of the tools or functions we make available to you (including unopened messages sent via our messaging system) may be monitored by learndirect staff to check the quality of tutor support. learndirect staff and auditors may also access these communications when we want to investigate or audit learner funding arrangements.

Keeping you informed

We, and our approved learning providers, will use your information to send you regular updates about :

our services and materials;
additions to the website; and
specific activities such as customer feedback surveys and competitions.

If you enrol on a learndirect course but do not wish to receive this information, untick the relevant boxes on the ’contact permissions’ page (inviting us to contact you by post and for customer feedback purposes). If you do wish to receive information about learndirect developments and offers by telephone, email and/or SMS, please invite us to contact you by ticking the appropriate boxes. If at any time, you change your mind about receiving updates, you can change your preferences using "your details" on your learner home page.

If you are simply requesting a free information pack, you can invite us to send you updates by ticking the appropriate boxes on the "request more information" page. If you change your mind about us contacting you for this purpose, please ring us on 08000 101 901 or email us.

We will never use your sensitive personal data for marketing purposes or to target you for customer feedback purposes without your express consent.

Funding

We, and our approved learning providers, may use your personal data to process or to support any application made for funding associated with your learning. For these purposes we, or our approved learning providers, will share the information you supply with the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) in England. The LSC may in turn share it with the European Social Fund, or other government agencies that may provide funding for your course, including the Welsh Assembly Government for learners who enrol in Welsh centres. If you are a learner between the ages of 16-19 years of age (or up to 25 years of age for learners with learning difficulties or disabilities), we are required by the LSC to notify Connexions when you leave, or intend to leave learning. We, or our approved learning providers, may also share it with the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) so that it can check our use of public monies. If you do not want us to use your personal data for these purposes, we will not be able to offer you the course at the reduced price.

At the point this information is collected you will be asked to indicate if you do not wish to be contacted by the LSC or its partners in respect of courses, surveys and research. Please read the LSC Data Protection Statement

We, or the government agency providing funding for your course, may use your personal data to investigate a suspected misuse of public monies or other fraudulent activity by any person relating to your learning activity. In doing so, we, or the government agency providing funding for your course, may disclose your information to other government agencies (e.g. the Department for Work and Pensions) to establish whether there has been any duplication of funding for your course. We may also contact you for the purposes of any such investigation.

Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP) and the Unique Learner Number (ULN)

The Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP) service is operated by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) for learners aged 14 years and over and learners registering for relevant post-14 qualifications. MIAP is responsible for the operation of the Learner Registration Service and also the creation of a Learner Record.

Learner Registration Service (LRS)

By enrolling with Ufi, you agree to us providing MIAP with the following personal data so that MIAP can allocate you a Unique Learner Number (ULN):

Given Name
Family Name
Gender
Date of birth
Postcode
Details of how your identity was verified

The LRS will enable organisations listed in section 537A of the Education Act (www.miap.gov.uk) to access your ULN and verify the details used to create your ULN, thereby saving you having to supply the same information repeatedly to different organisations.

Learner Record

By enrolling with Ufi, you also agree to us providing your participation and achievement data to MIAP so that MIAP can create and maintain a Learner Record. Your ULN will enable you to access the Ufi participation and achievement data held in your Learner Record via a website and will allow MIAP to share this data with those organisations listed in section 537A of the Education Act (www.miap.gov.uk), if you tell Ufi that you are happy for MIAP to do so. You can decide to opt out of MIAP sharing your participation and achievement data at any time and current details of how to do so can be found at www.miap.gov.uk or by telephoning 0845 6022589.

MIAP may use and disclose anonymised information pulled from Learner Records for statistical purposes.

Ufi is not responsible for MIAP's privacy practices and you should read about such practices at www.miap.gov.uk.

Statistics

We and/or the approved learning providers delivering and supporting your learning are also required to provide statistics to all of the government agencies mentioned under the heading 'Funding' and to the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, in order that they can carry out checks on our funding arrangements and our performance and for research and statistical purposes. This helps us, and our approved learning providers, to maintain our funding. Where such information is supplied, it is provided in an aggregated manner so that whilst such authorities may be aware of, for example, the number, geographic location and sex of persons using learndirect, you cannot be personally identified from this information.
However, we may provide information that identifies you (your name, date of birth, address and postcode) to the Department of Work and Pensions so that they can check whether learndirect learners have progressed into employment and compile statistical information about such progression. You will not be identifiable from the statistical information compiled.

The information collected on Welsh speakers is passed in an aggregate manner to the Welsh Assembly. You cannot be personally identified from this information.

Requests for information

If you have not registered as a learner but are simply making an enquiry or request for information, we will use your personal information to reply to your enquiry or request. We will not use this information for marketing purposes without your permission or unless you invite us to do so.

Protecting your personal information

We are registered as a data controller (in our registered company name of Ufi Limited) in line with the UK Data Protection Act, 1998. As a registered data controller, we are required to take appropriate technical measures to protect your personal information including making a regular backup of our system and data. We have security measures in place to make sure any personal information we collect is secure. Your account is password protected and all information including your password is on a secure server, which only a limited number of employees and sub-contractors can access. All parties with access to your information are subject to confidentiality obligations. If you think someone else knows your password, or is using it, tell us immediately and change your password using the "change my password" option under "your details" on your learner home page.

Even though we take appropriate technical steps to protect your security, you should remember that data transmission over the internet cannot always be guaranteed as 100% secure so you use the website at your own risk.

Please look at the terms and conditions on this website for our policy on purging emails and webspace. The terms and conditions tell you when we may close your account and delete all your records, files and information.

Keeping your personal data

We keep personal data :

for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for;
as required by law; or
to enforce or defend legal claims.

Sometimes we will keep information that you have deleted, for example messages sent by you to your tutor, as a record of your learning experience. We will keep this information for a reasonable time.

Cookies and other technologies

Cookies

Cookies are small text files which are sent to your browser by a web server and stored on your personal computer's hard disk. We use cookies on our site to :

cut down the number of times you have to type in data;
record the success of advertising, to target advertising and to track visitor usage; and
track responses to regular customer surveys and to make sure you don't see the same survey more than once.

The cookies used on the website do not collect your personal information.

You can disable cookies but if you do, you may not be able to use certain features on our site and you may need to enter your password more frequently. If you want to know how to remove cookies from your browser, go to the 'All About Cookies' website.

In general, we use third parties to conduct online surveys on our behalf. We do not issue the cookies used in these online surveys and these cookies may require your browser to connect to sites that are not run by us. You can find out more about the cookies used in online surveys conducted on our behalf by clicking through to the website of the third party that is conducting the online survey.

Transparent gif files

Some of our webpages may contain invisible electronic tags that allow us count users that have visited certain pages. These files are only used to identify which advertisements bring customers to our website and you cannot be identified by them. They are not issued by us but by the relevant advertising provider. You can find out more about cookie type devices issued by third party advertisers by clicking through to the website operated by the relevant advertiser.

In any event, you can find out more information about electronic tags, if you go to the 'All About Cookies' website.

Our policy for children

Our website is not designed for or directed at children under the age of 13. No one whose date of birth indicates that they are under 16 years will be able to register on-line as a learner. We recommend that you put parental controls on your internet browser and supervise your children when they are online.

We will not use information collected from people under 18 for marketing purposes. Government funding is not available to learners under 19.

Although anyone can take part in competitions and promotions, we will send notice of a win or prize directly to the parent or guardian identified during registration. Where a winner is under 18, we will not publish his or her personal details unless we have obtained the consent of the parent or guardian during registration.

Your rights

You have the right to ask for a copy of all the information we hold about you (we will charge you a small fee for this) and to correct any inaccuracies. To obtain a copy of this information, please ring us on 08000 101 901 or email us. You can amend your details on the website at any time using "your details" on your learner home page.

Links

Our website contains links to other websites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies of other sites and we advise you to read the privacy statement of every website that collects personal information from you.

Other information

You should note that if our business (or any part of it) is sold or transferred at any time, the information we hold may form part of the assets transferred although will still only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.