Education Scotland is committed to protecting our visitors' personal information. We want our online service to be safe for everyone. We aim to help you to understand what information we might collect about you through the use of cookies and how we use it.
Most websites you visit will use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you, either for the duration of your visit or for repeat visits.
Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it won’t recognise you and it won’t be able to keep you logged in.
A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a website’s server and only that server will be able to retrieve or read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It will contain some anonymous information such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers. It allows a website to remember things like your preferences.
You can use your web browser to:
Internet Explorer - Link to Microsoft help – How to delete cookie files in Internet Explorer
Chrome - Link to Chrome help – Manage cookies
Firefox - Link to Firefox help – Give certain websites the ability to store passwords, set cookies and more
Apple browsers including Safari - Support for cookies
Education Scotland is committed to compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect on May 25th 2018. The regulation contains the most significant changes to European data privacy legislation in the last 20 years. It is designed to give EU citizens more control over their data and seeks to unify a number of existing privacy and security laws under one comprehensive law.
Education Scotland is committed to helping individuals fulfill their requirements under the GDPR.
The following are a few examples of the key GDPR requirements that apply to both individuals and ourselves:
We will apply appropriate protection and management of any personally identifiable information you share with Education Scotland. Any personal information you do provide will be held and processed by Education Scotland in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and the GDPR.
Any personal information provided to Education Scotland will only be used to discharge our statutory functions and other relevant legislation, maintain our accounts and records and to support and manage our staff. We will only use information for those purposes, but we will share it with others for other purposes where it is legal and justifiable.
At Education Scotland, we manage, maintain and protect all information according to the requirements of the DPA and other legislation. We also adhere to our own information policies and government best practice.
In certain circumstances, we may process your personal information without your consent, and/or we may restrict your access to the information we hold about you. Such circumstances would only arise in relation to our statutory obligations. In these circumstances, there are exemptions from the DPA.
Education Scotland takes your privacy seriously and is committed to responsible handling of personal information in accordance with our Information Charter, which is as follows.
We will:
If you want to request information about our privacy policy, you can email Education Scotland on enquiries@educationscotland.gov.scot
