Privacy notice: Staff

Goldsmiths collects and processes personal data relating to its staff to manage the employment relationship, to conduct its operations effectively, and to fulfil its legal and regulatory responsibilities.

The organisation is committed to being transparent about how it collects and uses that data and to meeting its data protection obligations.

This notice explains how Goldsmiths will collect, use and share your personal data and sets out your rights in relation to your personal data.

It should be read alongside our general privacy information and other privacy notices.

Where your personal data is collected from

Your personal data is collected from the following sources:

• You – you provide data through application forms, CVs, resumes, identity documents, interviews, forms completed by you at the start of or during employment, correspondence with the College, meetings or other assessments or consultations
• Third parties – the College obtains data from various organisations such as your former employers, companies that conduct criminal records checks on behalf of Goldsmiths and training providers

The personal data that is collected and processed

The data collected and processed may include: 

• Your name, title, legal sex, date of birth, passport number
• Contact details (address, email addresses, phone numbers)
• Terms and conditions of your employment
• Details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history, including start and end dates, with previous employers and with the organisation
• Information about your remuneration, including entitlement to benefits such as pensions or insurance cover
• Details of your bank account and national insurance number
• Information about your marital status, next of kin, dependants and emergency contacts
• Information about your nationality and entitlement to work in the UK
• Information about your criminal record
• Details of your schedule (days of work and working hours) and attendance at work
• Details of periods of leave taken by you, including holiday, sickness absence, family leave and sabbaticals, and the reasons for the leave
• Details of any disciplinary or grievance procedures in which you have been involved, including any warnings issued to you and related correspondence
• Assessments of your performance, including appraisals, performance reviews and ratings, training you have participated in, performance improvement plans and related correspondence
• Your views on matters relating to the operation of the College
• Information about medical or health conditions, including whether or not you have a disability for which the organisation needs to make reasonable adjustments
• Details of trade union membership
• Equal opportunities monitoring information, including information about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, health and religion or belief
• Goldsmiths may also process biometric data to verify your identity, when required by law

Some of the above may contain or be “sensitive personal data”, otherwise known as “special category data”. This is data about your racial or ethnic origin, biometrics, religious beliefs or other beliefs, trade union membership or physical or mental health.

The purpose of processing your personal data

Goldsmiths will process your personal data for the following purposes:

• To enter into an employment contract with you and to fulfil its obligations under that contract – (e.g. to pay you and administer benefits)
• To fulfil its legal obligations – (for example, to ensure you are entitled to work in the UK)
• To fulfil its regulatory obligations (or example, reporting on certain elements of staff data to the OfS, UKRI, UKVI or designated body)
• To participate in exercises run by funding bodies (or example, REF)
• To run recruitment and promotion processes
• To maintain accurate and up-to-date employment records and contact details (including details of who to contact in the event of an emergency), and records of employee contractual and statutory rights
• To operate and keep a record of disciplinary and grievance processes, to ensure acceptable conduct within the workplace
• To operate and keep a record of employee performance and related processes, to plan for career development, and for succession planning and workforce management purposes
• To operate and keep a record of absence and absence management procedures, to allow effective workforce management and ensure that employees are receiving the pay or other benefits to which they are entitled
• To obtain occupational health advice, to ensure that it complies with duties in relation to individuals with disabilities, meet its obligations under health and safety law, and ensure that employees are receiving the pay or other benefits to which they are entitled
• To operate and keep a record of other types of leave (including maternity, paternity, adoption, parental and shared parental leave), to allow effective workforce management, to ensure that the organisation complies with duties in relation to leave entitlement, and to ensure that employees are receiving the pay or other benefits to which they are entitled
• To ensure the effectiveness of College operations
• To ensure effective general HR and business administration
• To provide references on request for current or former employees
• To respond to and defend against legal claims
• To maintain and promote equality in the workplace
• To maintain a staff directory on the gold.ac.uk website

Securing your personal data

Your personal data is held securely within the College. Access to the data is controlled. Staff processing the data receive relevant training on data protection and information security.

From time to time, the College may commission agents of a third party to enhance the systems storing your personal data.

Where this occurs they will act strictly in accordance with the instructions given by the College, scheduled within a data sharing agreement, so that your personal data remains secure.

Sharing your personal data with others

Your information will be shared internally, including with members of People and Operational Development and Finance (including Payroll), your line manager, managers in the department in which you work and IT staff if access to the data is necessary for performance of their roles.  

Special category data will not be shared without your permission. Aggregated equality data will be shared with College managers and committees and published on our website for the purpose of equality monitoring.

It is occasionally necessary for Goldsmiths to share your personal data with third parties. It may be necessary to share your personal data as follows:

• To any organisation that may be contracted by the College to undertake criminal convictions checks
• To any organisation that may be contracted by the College to provide occupational health services
• To any organisation that may be contracted by the College to provide benchmarking or other services to enhance institutional efficiency
• To Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs
• To funding bodies to participate in exercises they run (e.g. REF)
• To the Office for Students, UKRI, UKVI, or designated data body
• To the trustees of the Universities Superannuation Scheme and the London Pensions Fund Authority and their agents
• To cooperate with the HSE in relation to their investigations of accidents at work

Special category data will not be shared without your permission.

Arrangements will be in place to ensure that your data is exchanged in a secure manner.

Where the College engages third parties to process personal data on its behalf, they do so on the basis of written instructions, are under a duty of confidentiality and are obliged to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security of data.

Appropriate safeguards will be put in place where your data is to be transferred outside the European Union.

HESA

The College makes a return to Higher Education Statistics Agency Limited (HESA) each year for all member of staff. The return contains anonymised personal data and sensitive personal data (e.g. sexual identification, location on leaving, nationality).

This data is collected by HESA to inform government policy and to make calculations for university league tables. The data is provided to HESA strictly and solely for this purpose.

All of the HESA collection notices are available on the  HESA website, including the Staff Collection Notice.

How long Goldsmiths retains personal data for

Goldsmiths will hold your personal data for the duration of your employment. It will continue to hold your personal data after the end of your employment for so long as it has a lawful basis and legitimate business need to do so.

The legal basis for processing your data

Goldsmiths relies on several different legal bases. Depending on the processing being performed these may include one or more of the following:

• Consent – processing will sometimes be carried out in accordance with your consent
• Performance of the employment contract – processing is required to fulfil the College’s contractual obligations to you
• Vital interest – to protect the vital interests of yourself or another, particularly in the case of medical emergencies
• Legal obligation – providing data to statutory and regulatory agencies
• Public interest – to enable teaching and research, which delivers a public and societal benefit
• Legitimate interest – in processing personal data to fulfil the purposes scheduled above, the College being satisfied that this interest is not overridden by your data privacy rights and freedoms

Your rights

Privacy legislation gives you have a number of rights to decide how your personal data is collected and processed. Details of these are contained within the general information on our website.

See general privacy information on how we process personal data and other privacy notices.

Further information regarding your rights as an individual is available from the Information Commissioners website.

You have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the way Goldsmiths processes your personal data. Details on how to complain can be found on the Office’s website.

Changes to this notice

This Notice may be amended or updated. Where this occurs, Goldsmiths will announce the change on its website. Once this has been done, you will be deemed to have accepted the change.

Contact details

Should you have any concern about your personal data at Goldsmiths please contact the Data Protection Officer by email via: dp (@gold.ac.uk).