STO is part of King’s College London (“King’s”, “we” “us”, or “our”).

King’s act as controller in respect of your data as we determine the purpose and the manner that any personal data is, or is likely to be, processed. This means that we are legally responsible for the personal data we collect and hold about you.

One of our responsibilities is to tell you about the different ways in which we use your personal data and your rights in relation to the information that you, or someone else provides, about you.

This privacy notice supplements the following wider privacy notices: King’s College London Core Privacy Notice , Student Data Collection Notice.

The STO team leads the university-wide approach to student attainment at King’s. We exist to make King’s a more equitable and compassionate place to study. We support historically underrepresented students in terms of their student experience and outcomes at university. We focus on attainment for students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds due to our Office for Students targets within the Access & Participation Plan (APP). Through the new APP we will address risks to equality of opportunity for underrepresented learners at King’s at all stages of the student lifecycle.  

We collect your personal data when engaging with students from specific ethnic backgrounds to participate in one of our projects, programmes or research proposals, to address structural barriers that may prevent students from specific backgrounds from succeeding; and enabling staff to develop interventions and processes to mitigate this. The types of data that we typically hold is:

• Name
• Student ID
• Contact details including email address
• Faculty, programme of study
• Ethnicity
• Disability
• Age
• Gender

We process your personal information to:

• Conduct research to gain a comprehensive understanding of barriers.
• Manage focus groups to gain a quantitatively narrative from students to inform interventions.
• Implement interventions & programmes to develop tangible actions to improve the student experience for specific student groups.
• Manage events to enable us to deliver targeted interventions and support to specific student groups.
• Inform our projects.
• Enable us to communicate with you.

We do not share your data in any form that would enable you to be identified. We only share aggregated non-identifying data for business analysis and reporting purposes.

The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 outlines, under the Access and Participation section of the Act, the requirements of Access and Participation Plans (APP). Section 32 of the Act obliges institutions to include in their APPs provisions relating to the promotion of equality of opportunity.

The lawful basis of a task carried out in the public interest enables us to meet our statutory obligation to run programmes and evidence effectiveness of such programmes to funders, education regulators such as (but not limited to) the Office for Students, and central Government.

We process special category data (sensitive) data related to your ethnicity and disability status so that we can deliver successful targeted interventions and support to specific student groups to meet our statutory obligations and APP objectives. We conduct research, put in place conduct interventions and programmes and the like on the basis of substantial public interest, for the purpose of equality of opportunity or treatment and to also meet our statutory obligations.

We also process data in both yours and our legitimate interest to enable us to manage and administer the programmes we offer, to communicate with you about our activities, and to invite you to attend focus groups and events etc. We may process this data to ensure that you have the appropriate support in place to attend events, when that is required.

The information provided will be retained for 5 years in line with the King’s Records Retention Schedule.

As an individual whose data we process, you have certain rights in relation to that processing of your data.

To find out more about how the University deals with your personal information, including your rights and who to contact if you have a concern, please see the university’s core privacy notice at: King's College London Core Privacy Notice.

If you need to get in touch with us about our services, please contact chinelo.bennett@kcl.ac.uk.