Privacy Policy

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

This policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others, and how we keep it secure.

If you have any questions regarding this policy please email the Digital Development Manager  or by post to The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 62-64 Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY.

You can also contact the School’s Data Protection Officer, for example if you have any general questions about Central’s privacy practices, by email, or by writing to them at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 62-64 Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY.

Who we are

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (or Central) is a small and specialist higher education institution that stands at the forefront of training and research in the theatre and performance arts. On our website you can find out more about the School, including its range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Company and exempt charity information about Central can also be found there.

How we collect information from you

We obtain information about you when you use our website: for example, when you contact us about products and services, make a booking at an open event, purchase a ticket for an event, register your interest in one of our programmes or request a prospectus, or if you register to receive updates about a programme that interests you.

By using our website, you are agreeing to be bound by this policy. For further information, please refer to our website’s terms and conditions of use.

What personal data we hold

The personal information we collect might includes your name, address, telephone number, email address, your current or previous school, college or university, current course of study, qualifications, job title, IP address, and information regarding what pages are accessed by you and when. If you purchase a ticket for an event, this is managed by our third party payment processors (Eventbrite), who specialise in the secure online capture and processing of personal information and credit/debit card transactions, as explained below.

We are concerned to protect the privacy of children aged 16 or under. If you are aged 16 or under‚ please get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide us with personal information.

How we use your information and how long we keep it for

We may use your information to:

  • process orders that you have submitted;
  • carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and us;
  • deal with enquiries into programmes or services that we offer;
  • seek your views or comments on the services we provide;
  • notify you of changes to our services;
  • send you communications which you have requested and that may be of interest to you. These may include information about events (including international and UK based auditions and interviews, open events and tasters), and information about programmes at Central;
  • process an application for a programme, or a job application;
  • review our advertising campaigns, application or enquiry statistics (this is done with pseudonymised data only);
  • contact you if you are an alumni of the School: alumni communications usually cover general information about our latest industry achievements, campaigns and events, as well as more specific information for a specific subject or year group. Read our Alumni Privacy Policy.

We may analyse your personal information to create a profile of your interests and preferences so that we can contact you with information relevant to you. We may make use of additional information about you when it is available from external sources to help us do this effectively, for example your social media profiles. We may also use your personal information to detect and reduce fraud and credit risk.

We review our retention periods for personal information on an annual basis. We are legally required to hold some types of information to fulfil our statutory obligations. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as it is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with us. Read our Data Protection and Records Retention Policy for more detailed information.

Who has access to your information

We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.

We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Third Party Service Providers working on our behalf: We may pass your information to our third party service providers, agents, subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf (for example to process donations, send you mailings or complete ticket orders). However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service, and we have contracts in place with all third party service providers that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes. Please be reassured that we will not release your information to third parties unless you have requested us to do so, or we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime.

Third Party Product Providers we work in association with: When you are purchasing a ticket, for example for a production or audition, your payment is processed by a third party payment processor (currently Eventbrite), which specialises in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us.

Your rights to update, access or withdraw your information

Updating your information

The accuracy of your information is important to us. We’re working on ways to make it easier for you to review and correct the information that we hold about you. In the meantime, if you change email address, or any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please email our Webmaster.

Accessing your information

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information the School holds about you, known as a Subject Access Request. You can find out how to request this data.

Withdrawing consent and erasing your information

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. If you do not want to receive direct marketing communications from us about our products and services, then you can select your choices by ticking the relevant boxes situated on the form on which we collect your information.

We will not contact you for marketing purposes by email, phone or text message unless you have given your prior consent. We will not contact you for marketing purposes by post if you have indicated that you do not wish to be contacted. You can change your marketing preferences at any time by contacting us by email.

You can also ask us to erase the personal information that we hold about you. Please email us for more information.

How we keep your personal data safe

When you give us personal information, we take steps to ensure that it’s treated securely. Any sensitive information (such as credit or debit card details) is encrypted and protected with the following software 128 Bit encryption on SSL. When you are on a secure page, a lock icon will appear in the URL bar of web browsers such as Firefox or Google Chrome.

Non-sensitive details (your email address etc.) are transmitted normally over the Internet, and this can never be guaranteed to be 100% secure, although we aim to provide every page on our website as secure https. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. Where we have given (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our websites (for example if you have access to edit your student or staff profile), you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.

Use of ‘cookies’

Like many other websites, Central’s website uses ‘cookies’. Cookies are small pieces of information sent by an organisation to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when you visit. They collect statistical data about your browsing actions and patterns and do not identify you as an individual. For example, we use cookies to store your country preference. This helps us to improve our website and deliver a better more personalised service.

It is possible to switch off cookies by setting your browser preferences. For more information on how to switch off cookies on your computer, visit our full cookies policy. Turning cookies of may result in a loss of functionality when using our website.

You can read our Cookie Policy in full here.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites run by other organisations. This privacy policy applies only to our website‚ so we encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit. We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other sites even if you access them using links from our website.

In addition, if you linked to our website from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners and operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site. For further information, please refer to our website’s terms and conditions of use.

Transferring your information outside of Europe

As part of the services offered to you through this website, the information which you provide to us may be transferred to countries outside the European Union (“EU”). By way of example, this may happen if any of our servers are from time to time located in a country outside of the EU. These countries may not have similar data protection laws to the UK. By submitting your personal data, you’re agreeing to this transfer, storing or processing. If we transfer your information outside of the EU in this way, we will take steps to ensure that appropriate security measures are taken with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this policy.

If you use our services while you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU in order to provide you with those services.

Changes to this policy

We keep this policy under regular review. This policy was last updated on 7 March 2018.

Complaints or queries

We take any complaints we receive about the use and security of your personal information very seriously. If you think that our collection or use of your information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate please contact the School’s Data Protection Officer by email or write to them at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 62-64 Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY.

We would also welcome your suggestions for improving our procedures.

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