Data Protection/Privacy policy

Your personal information

When you first contact the ifs School of Finance we create a record in your name and allocate you a unique ifs number. Any information that you give us from then on is added to your record.

The ifs is committed to the protection of your personal information in accordance with the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998.

Use of your personal information

Your personal information is used in the following ways:

To process your application for the study of modules and qualifications. This may also require your personal information to be passed to a third party for the delivery of study materials or the provision of teaching or examination facilities. Your personal details will be passed to our academic partners, the University of Manchester (UoM) or the University of Kent (UoK), if you are studying a UoM/UoK validated module. Please refer directly to UoM (www.manchester.ac.uk) or UoK (www.kent.ac.uk) for details of their data protection policies explaining how they will use your data.

Your course results:

May be disclosed to your employer if your application included details of your employer;
May be disclosed to your provider of tuition or other parties who have an interest in your academic progress;
May be published in Financial World and/or a national newspaper when you have completed the award. The information published will be your name, the name of your employer and details of your award.

We will use your details:

To process any application you make for membership of the ifs and to maintain that membership.
To process any application for additional services, such as ifs seminars, conferences or library services. If your application is for an event that is sponsored, your contact details will be passed to the sponsor of the event. You will be informed if your details are to be passed to the sponsor when you apply to attend.
To provide information about additional services that may be of interest to you.
To undertake research in order to help us plan and improve our services.
To provide information to government bodies, such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), in accordance with statutory and government requirements.

Transferring information overseas

The ifs School of Finance has students and members throughout the world and the personal information of those students and members is necessarily transferred overseas when providing information for the fulfilment of applications for study or membership services.

Information collected automatically

When you visit our website we automatically collect some technical information about your visit. This is not personal information, but includes your IP address, the type of browser used, the duration of your visit and the pages visited. We use this information to improve the navigation and accessibility of our website. If you access one of the secure areas of the website we record some details of your visit and we use this information to look for ways to improve the service we offer you.

The use of Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that is stored temporarily by your browser and used by the website you are visiting to remember you throughout your visit to that website. The ifs uses session (non-persistent) cookies to identify you when you log into a secure area and thereby avoid the need for you to repeat the entry of your password as you navigate around the secure areas of the website. The cookies are deleted as soon as a session is ended.

The ifs also uses persistent cookies to store non-personal details when you visit our website. This enables us to find out whether your computer has visited our website before by checking to see, and finding, the cookie left there on the last visit. Using these cookies we are able to examine and analyse, in an anonymous and aggregate way, how our websites are used in order that we can improve the layout, navigation and accessibility of the websites.

Links

The ifs School of Finance website contains links to other websites and this data protection policy does not apply to those websites. If you transfer to another website you should read their data protection statement for their policy on the use of personal information.

Contact

If you have any comments or questions regarding this policy, please contact the Data Protection Coordinator at:

IFS House
4 - 9 Burgate Lane
Canterbury
Kent
CT1 2XJ

Last updated 24 November 2006