The details provided to us when you applied to the University form the basis of your core student record, which is the high-level record retained by Registry. Your core student record also includes:
- data you provide on registration, annual re-registration;
- data you provide through the my.bham portal; and
- information collected and entered by the University during your studies, which may be held either by Registry or your School or College.
Your core record is generally that held by Registry on your central record but can include data held locally by your School or College. Your core record includes:
- Your personal details, such as your name, home address and other contact details, age and date of birth, gender, nationality, country of birth, your dependents, whether you are a care leaver;
- Information about your course or thesis;
- Tuition and other fee charges, funding and payments;
- Information about your sponsor;
- Immigration and visa information (if you are an international student);
- Details of incoming or outgoing student exchanges;
- Leave of absence, authorised absence or, exclusion data;
- Summaries of the outcomes of academic appeals;
- Information relating to modules and placements;
- Information about extracurricular activities which are recorded on your transcript (such as volunteer work, Guild of Students sabbatical positions, prizes won, sports achievements etc.);
- Data about your examinations, assessments and results, the qualification awarded;
- Any honours, scholarships and prizes you have been nominated for or have won;
- Your leaving date and the reason for leaving.
The School or department in which you study will also keep local records about you which will not form part of your core record, including:
- Details of your engagement with procedures (including academic appeals, Extenuating Circumstances, Fitness to Practise, leave of absence, plagiarism, misconduct procedures);
- Attendance and absence records;
- Information relating to modules, placements, examinations (including scripts) and assessments,
- Your Reasonable Adjustments Plan (if relevant to you);
- Your interactions with your tutors, supervisors and welfare tutors,
- Visa and immigration data;
- Details of your engagement with online learning platforms provided by the University (e.g. IP address, usage data, dates/times of engagement); and
- General correspondence and administration.
Library Services will also keep records about you, which again will not form part of your core record, including:
- Your borrowing history;
- Fines;
- Notes relating to interactions with library staff;
- Inter Library Loans;
- Reservations; and
- Attendance at Library training or workshop events.
The University will also keep records about your use of the academic and non-academic facilities and services, including your use of IT Services and facilities, that we offer and processes and procedures with which you engage (for example, if you are a student representative, your engagement with online learning platforms provided by the University, or you raise a concern or complaint) or which you are subject to (such as misconduct proceedings).
In addition to this, the University may need to process some data about you that is classed as ‘special category’ or sensitive personal data. We will usually ask you for consent to do this. This data includes data about your ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or health/disability data which we use to plan for and provide help or reasonable adjustments. We also use this data to help us plan our courses and facilities, and we also use it for reporting and monitoring purposes. The University will make sure that access to, and the sharing of, your special category personal data are controlled very carefully.
If necessary, where there has been an outbreak of a pandemic, such as Covid-19, or some other incident which may affect the health or safety of the University community, as part of the University’s public task, the University may also collect data on which areas or buildings of the University campus you have recently accessed and when, for the purposes of managing the health and safety of the University community. The data collected for this purpose will be your name, student ID number, telephone/email address so that if necessary, we can contact you in relation to NHS Test and Trace and to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. This data will be kept and held securely for 21 days after which it will be deleted or destroyed. We may also collect special category (e.g. health) data as part of this duty and for reasons of public health, for example, if you have told us that you have tested positive for Covid-19. Where it is necessary to collect special category data, such as health information, for this purpose we will only share this with government agencies, such as National Institute for Health Protection/Public Health England (or such other relevant government body) for the purposes of government initiatives like Test and Trace, in order to comply with our legal obligations. In any other case we will ask for your express consent before passing this data to any other organisation.
For certain courses, in order to assess your suitability to work with patients, children or other vulnerable people and your fitness to practise for entry into some regulated professions, it is necessary to process other special category data, such as data about your health or disability.
Criminal convictions: The University may hold and process data about criminal offences and criminal convictions if you have disclosed this as part of the admissions process, or by completing the yearly online registration, or if it is appropriate, given the nature of your programme (for example, if a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is needed for your programme). We will use information about criminal convictions and offences in the following ways:
- To consider your suitability to become a member of the University or to continue to be a member of the University or to decide if any support or measures need to be put in place;
- To comply with regulatory requirements to decide your suitability to study on a regulated programme or to practise in a regulated profession;
- To ensure that we adequately assess any risk posed to the wider University community.
We will only use information relating to criminal convictions where the law allows us to do so and in line with our Data Protection Policy. Personal data relating to criminal convictions will be retained confidentially and securely and access to that data will be strictly controlled.
When using video conferencing applications such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, your name, user name, email address, your computer’s IP address, MAC address and device name may be collected.