Privacy Policy

Last updated: 28th February 2022

Your privacy is important to us.

The following Privacy Policy applies to users of ratededu.co.uk and customers of Rated Educational Suppliers and Services.

This privacy policy statement will inform you about how we collect information, how we store it, and how we use it. It is intended to assist you to make informed decisions when using our website, products, and services.

What We Do

Rated Educational Suppliers and Services, is created and run by a network of educational leaders; Headteachers, Deputies, Governors, School Business Managers, Teachers, Special Educational Needs Coordinators, Safeguarding Leads and many others from early years’ settings right through to universities with a common goal to provide a platform of authentic reviews of goods and services provided by suppliers.

Data We Collect

We will request information such as your name, contact details (including address, postcode, telephone number, email address), and company details, which you can choose to provide when you either subscribe to our email newsletter or use our online services such as our contact forms.

We need to collect this information to be able to provide you with our products and services. It also helps us personalise and deliver relevant content in any e-mails. The legal basis for our collection of this data is defined as ‘Legitimate Interest’ as per Recital 47 of Article 6(f) of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), as it is reasonable for you to expect that you will be contacted in regards to your enquiry after having emailed us or entered your contact details into an enquiry form. We do not collect ‘sensitive data’ about you (as specified in Article 9 of the GDPR as data about ‘racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership’.)

We do not knowingly collect, process or share the Personal Data of children or minors, if you are under 18, please do not provide any personal information to us. You do not have to provide us with any Personal Data if you do not want to, however, we will be unable to contact you about your enquiry if you do not. We will also collect aggregate information from our website visitors by using cookies. This data is used to customise the content of our website and social media to help deliver an improved experience for our users and it will not personally identify you.

Use of Personal Data

If you provide your telephone number to us, we will contact you via phone to qualify your enquiry and to ascertain your requirements. We may also contact you via email with information we believe will be of interest to you.

We also use your information for the purposes of administering and expanding our business activities, providing customer services, and making available our products and services to both existing customers and prospective customers.

We may send you marketing communications relating to our business or the businesses of carefully-selected third parties which we think may be of interest to you, by post, by email, or by telephone (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications).

We may need to supply some of your data to a third party to be able to supply you with a service. We will only provide the data that is essential to the provision of the service. We will retain your Personal Data for up to 24 months, either from the date of submission or from our last communication with you. The reasons we retain your Personal Data for this period are as follows:

• It may take us some time to contact you after you have made your enquiry
• Once we have contacted you we may contact you by way of a courtesy call to ensure that your requirements have been met and to maintain the standards of the service we provide
• We run promotions and launch new products from time to time. We will update you with this information if we believe it is of interest or benefit to you
• We have more information to refer to if you contact us again in the future or make a complaint
• We will need this information if we are providing you with any services

How We Store Your Data And Information

We make reasonable efforts to keep your data and information safe. This means where we store this information electronically, we keep our software up to date and use modern security software.

Your Data Rights

Under GDPR you have certain rights regarding your Personal Information. We have outlined the rights that apply to the Personal Data we collect, which are as follows:

• The right to be informed – this means you have a right to know what happens with your Personal Data. This Privacy Policy should provide you with this information
• The right of access – this means you have the right to know what Personal Data we hold about you. We will provide this information to you free of charge
• The right of rectification – if the Personal Data we hold about you is incorrect or incomplete you have the right to correct it or complete it
• The right to erasure – sometimes known as ‘the right to be forgotten’ this means if you request us to do so, we will delete the Personal Data we hold about you. This means we may not be able to provide you with services in the future
• The right to restrict processing – this means that you can request for us to cease processing your data rather than deleting it. This means we may not be able to provide you with services in the future
• The right to data portability – this means if you request Personal Data from us we will provide it in a commonly used, machine-readable form
• The right to object – this means you can object to us processing your Personal Data if you do not believe it is in your interest
• You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority if you so wish

Types of Data Collected

Account Logins

For some website functionality, we will need to create for you a user account that allows you to log in to the website to ensure that only authorised individuals can access your data and that functionality. Examples include when you make an online purchase via the website, or when you have a role in administering or contributing towards the website content (such as a blog author).

The purpose of these user accounts is to protect your personal data behind login security and to protect the integrity of our website and the servers that run it.

Data collected will generally involve your name and email address (which doubles as username) as a minimum, but may include your postal address if it is required for online purchases.

If you do not register for an online account, then no such data will be collected in this regard.

IP Address

An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are using the web. Web servers automatically identify your computer by its IP address. On occasions, we collect IP addresses for the purposes of system administration, to analyse aggregate information, and to audit the use of our website.

Cookies & Similar Technologies

Cookies are informational files that a website transfers to an individual’s hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies make web surfing easier for you by saving your preferences while you are visiting our site. The use of cookies is an industry standard and you will find them on most major websites. By showing how and when visitors use our site, cookies help us see which areas are popular and which are not. Many improvements and updates to the site are based on such data as the total number of visitors and pages viewed and this information is most easily tracked with cookies.

We use cookies to better understand and improve areas of our website that our users find valuable. While both of these activities depend on the use of a cookie, visitors to our website always have the option of disabling cookies via their browser preferences. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, note that some parts of our website may not function properly or may be considerably slower if you refuse cookies.

Use of Clear GIFs

A clear GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) or pixel tag (also known as a ‘Web beacon’) is a line of code placed on some of our web pages and in emails which, in a similar way to our use of cookies above, allow us to analyse the specific usage patterns of visitors.

Website Analytics

Our website uses Google Analytics to help us to understand how people use our website. It does this by tracking information such as how long people spend on our website, the pages they visit, the website that referred them to our website, and other aggregate data. We do this so that we can make improvements to our website and provide a better user experience and more engaging content. As analytics information is not personal data, we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.

For more information on how Google handles the data it collects, see Google’s Privacy Policy.

To opt-out of Google Analytics tracking on all sites, use the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Other Google Services

In addition to Google Analytics, we use a number of industry-standard Google services to provide particular pieces of website content. These include:

• Google Fonts: We may use one or more of Google’s web fonts to ensure that our website content is displayed in a clear and consistent fashion across all of the different types of devices and browsers
• Google Maps: We may use Google’s mapping services to provide dynamic geographic maps on our website
• Google Recaptcha: We may use Google’s Recaptcha service (which provides the ‘I Am Not A Robot’ functionality) on our web contact forms. Recaptcha is a security measure to prevent the abuse of our contact forms by automated programs
• Google AdWords: We may use Google AdWords remarketing which allows us to reach people who have been on our website, and show them adverts relevant to the pages they have visited. This means, after your visit to our website, you may be shown ads by Google either within the Google Display Network or Google search results. Google AdWords uses cookies in order to show ads based on your past visits to websites to provide relevant ads for products and services of interest to you

Each of these services involves our website making a connection to one or more Google servers, and may result in Google placing cookies on your device.

Facebook

We use social media cookies from Facebook on our website. Facebook places the cookies, and we use them to understand the effectiveness of social media campaigns that we operate.

If you are not logged into Facebook when you view our website, then it is not possible for any personal information about your visit to be collected. Therefore we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.

If you are logged into Facebook when you view our website, then Facebook will know when you visit Us. We do not have any access to the details of that personal data, as you have consented to share it with Facebook, not Us. We just get to see anonymised data about the numbers of people who have responded to our advertising or other social media activity.

You can learn about Facebook’s Privacy Policy here.

Facebook may use cookies, web beacons, and other storage technologies to collect or receive information from your websites and elsewhere on the internet and use that information to provide measurement services and target ads.

There are several ways of controlling the ads that you see based on your activity on Facebook. The following resources may help to understand those choices:

• How to opt-out of Facebook interest-based advertising on your browser or mobile device.
• About Ads: https://www.aboutads.info/choices
• Your Online Choices: https://www.youronlinechoices.eu/

You can always use your browser’s private or incognito mode to browse websites anonymously.

If you disable marketing cookies on this website, it does not mean that you will not see our ads, it just means that they will not be personalised based on your Facebook activity.

Payments

If we provide paid products and services, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).

We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information is governed by their Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information.

The payment processors that we may use are:

• Stripe: Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
• PayPal: Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
• Google Pay: Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
• Apple Pay: Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.

Third-party Links

This Privacy Policy only applies to this website. This website may include links to third-party websites, plugins, and applications. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements and how they use your data.

How to Contact Us

Email: info@ratededu.co.uk

Postal Address: The Business Terrace, Maidstone House, King Street, Maidstone, ME15 6AW

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy. If we make changes, the updated Privacy Policy will be posted on this website, and the revised Privacy Policy will take effect once posted. Your continued use of this website after the posting will signify your agreement to the new Privacy Policy.