These surveys are carried out by Advance HE (AHE) (previously called the Higher Education Academy) on behalf of higher education providers including BU. Jisc (an organisation which provides IT and data support in the higher education sector) stores and transmits the survey data to AHE on BU’s behalf.
BU is the Data Controller of your personal data within your survey responses. This means that BU has the core legal responsibility to safeguard the information and ensure it is processed in accordance with data protection laws. Agreements are in place to ensure that survey data is processed securely at all stages of the process.
Data you provide in one of these surveys will be used by BU for analysis, to improve our understanding of the postgraduate experience and inform decisions about BU’s provision. Your name and email address are used for administration of the survey, but BU deletes these identifiers before accessing survey responses. It is important that you follow the guidance within the survey itself to avoid including potentially identifiable information about yourself or others in your responses. Your personal data and survey responses will not be used for the purposes of identifying you or to make any decisions about you personally. You will not be identified in any publication by BU which relates to the survey results.
The legal basis for processing your data within the survey is your consent. There is no obligation or requirement for you to participate in the survey.
For further information about the administration of the survey, please see below: For more details on how BU processes the personal data of its students generally and your rights under the data protection legislation please see our Student privacy notice.
If you have any queries about the processing of your data, please contact BU’s Data Protection Office, or by post to Data Protection Office, c/o Legal Services, Studland House S106a, 12 Christchurch Rd, Bournemouth BH1 3NA.
More information about privacy in relation to PRES and PTES responses
For some courses/programmes we will receive only a small number of survey responses, either because of the small number of students on that programme and level or because only a small proportion of the students on the programme have participated in the survey. Where this is the case we are conscious that there may be an increased risk of individual students being identifiable from the content of any free-text comments in their responses, even though the comments will not be linked to your name or email address. We have decided that we will still process comments in these circumstances, by sharing them with the relevant programme staff. This is because your responses are so valuable to our understanding of the student experience, and in most cases there will be no risk of identification or of adverse impact on students. Staff will be directed not to make any attempt to identify students from survey responses, not to ask students whether they have submitted a survey response and not to seek to discuss individual survey comments with students. If you are concerned about being identified from comments but still wish to participate in the survey, you can reduce the chances of identification through adjusting the content of your comments or by choosing not to make text comments.
You should take this information into account before proceeding to take part in the survey. If at any time between completing the survey and the end of the survey period you change your mind about whether you wish your comments to be shared with BU staff, please contact us and we will remove your survey response from our systems before the responses are processed and shared. However please note that once we delete the names and email addresses linked to the responses (as described above) the responses will be shared and we will no longer be able to identify and delete the content of your response before it is shared with the programme staff.