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This privacy notice sets out how we use any information collected about our alumni provided to us during their time at the School. This summary provides an overview of how we will process² personal data and is provided in accordance with the rights of individuals under General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). All members of the school alumni¹ community are encouraged to read the full privacy notice and understand the school’s obligations to its entire community. This notice applies to all alumni with either online profiles or alumni with offline database records.
From time-to-time this notice may be updated at the School’s discretion or when legal requirements mandate a change. Any revisions will normally only be notified via this webpage, or directly with you by email.
This information is provided in accordance with Data Protection Law to understand how the School uses any personal data. The School is the ‘Data Controller’ and has responsibility for data privacy associated with www.yarmalumni.org, and has appointed the Director of Finance and Operations as Privacy Officer. They will endeavour to ensure that all personal data is processed in compliance with this notice and the Principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 (as superseded), the GDPR and PECR. They can be contacted at kelly.heward@yarmschool.org.
We maintain a database of alumni / governors / employees / supporters / parents / pupils in order to stay in touch with our whole community. The alumni database allows a choice of choosing to join our online community by registering on the Alumni website and creating an online profile, or some alumni are retained on an offline database record.
We process personal data so that we can:-
We only process personal data when it is necessary and lawful. More information on specific activities is provided in the full Alumni Privacy Notice, 21k Privacy Notice for Alumni
Under UK GDPR, we rely on the following lawful bases, depending on the activity:
Legal obligation - e.g. due diligence or safeguarding
Public Task - site security and visitor management for events
Legitimate Interest - e.g. alumni relations, fundraising (balanced carefully against individual rights); and the management of our alumni website, IT services and network security).
Consent - used only where required, such as certain marketing, photography, or online cookies. Alumni provide consent to process personal information.
Examples of data which will be processed by us are;
Alumni - Former Pupils - typically extracted from pupil records and may include the following:-
In some cases alumni can choose to add other data to their profile which could include:
The School may also update alumni careers details based on information which is available in the public domain.
Former employees, governors and parents included as alumni
Any further personal details pertaining to former employees, governors or volunteers will be retained according to the School’s Data Retention and Disposal Policy.
The information provided is used by the School for a variety of alumni activities. When alumni consent, the School may contact you with relevant information and marketing communications such as:
The website may track emails and any links clicked on in our emails; this may be used to personalise digital content to individual alumni. The Toucan Tech website uses cookies to retain user preferences and collect website usage information via Google Analytics such as IP addresses. Further information on cookies, and how to disable them if desired can be found on www.yarmalumni.org.
Consent & Retention
Alumni who maintain a personal online profile can update their consent options by logging-in and clicking on “My Settings” in their profile. Scroll down to find ‘Consent options’ where “opt-in”, “opt-out” and “unspecified” consent options are available.
Should alumni wish to hide their profile and limit notifications, this can be done from ‘My Settings’ to adjust accordingly. Individual alumni names (but not full profile) may appear in various places around the website, such as a ‘Recent Joiners’ box and in ‘Search’ results, irrespective of the privacy settings selected. If alumni click ‘unsubscribe’ at the bottom of any email sent from within the Toucan Tech system, they will be automatically opted-out of these types of email communications in the future.
Ordinarily, the onus is on alumni as ‘data subjects’ to update their communication preferences regularly, including whether to exercise their ‘right to be forgotten’ (by emailing the Alumni Team at alumni@yarmschool.org). In doing so, the implication for alumni upon deletion of their records means they will no longer receive any communications from School about alumni-related events and activities.
Except as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law or regulation, we will hold alumni personal information for as long as it is necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected, as required to satisfy and legal, accounting or reporting obligations. Where we rely on consent to contact alumni, we will treat that consent as lasting only for as long as it is reasonable to do so. We may periodically ask alumni to renew or update their consent.
The School will take appropriate steps to safeguard alumni personal data, which is stored on a dedicated, secure cloud server hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the EU and is managed by the alumni website (www.yarmalumni.org) provider, ToucanTech. Industry standard firewalls, anti-virus, encryption and back-up methods are in place, as well as strict data handling protocols.
Only authorised persons have access to your information, i.e. only our approved employees and contractors, and that everyone who has access is appropriately trained in data management.
If alumni maintain an online profile for the www.yarmalumni.org website, they are responsible for keeping their login details (email and password) confidential. We strongly advise that alumni do not share their password with anyone.
Some of our processing activity is carried out on our behalf by third parties (such as our web developers or cloud storage providers) in accordance with Data Protection Law and subject to contractual assurances that personal data will be kept securely and in accordance with the school’s specific directions.
Alumni personal data will not be passed without permission to external organisations or individuals, other than those companies with whom we have contractual agreements with regarding data security, such as the School’s website developer. Alumni personal data will never be sold by the School.
If alumni personal details change, we really appreciate you taking the time to notify us. Under GDPR, you have the right to withdraw your consent for us to use your data or to have us correct it, should you consider it inaccurate. You can do this by updating your profile on www.yarmalumni.org or by emailing alumni@yarmschool.org.
In the event of a data related issue remaining unresolved to your satisfaction, we encourage individuals to raise any concerns directly with the School in the first instance by contacting alumni@yarmschool.org. If the matter is not resolved to your satisfaction, you can choose to escalate the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) https://ico.org.uk/ if you believe that we have not handled your data according to the principles of GDPR.
Full Privacy Notice can be found here.
¹Alumni refers to any governors, employees, parents and pupils who were previously working or studying at Yarm School or engaged as fee-payer stakeholders.
²Process means any operation performed upon personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction.
Date: 19th August 2026