Privacy Notice for Report + Support

The Report + Support tool serves as a vehicle for individuals to report unacceptable behaviour; seek internal support in respect of unacceptable behaviour; or raise safeguarding concerns associated with a member of the BCU community. Individuals can report in respect of themselves or on behalf of someone else. The report will ask you what happened and when. It allows for the quick reporting of incidents as well as access to additional support quickly and easily.

Reports made by individuals to BCU will be one of the following:

• Report anonymously: no details to identify the reporting party are provided here and therefore, the report is anonymous.
• Report with contact details: where the name and contact details of the reporting party are provided with the report.

The Report and Support system is overseen by Mental Health & Wellbeing (for reports relating to students) and Human Resources (for reports relating to staff).

Anonymous reports

Reporting anonymously via Report + Support means that the details of the reporting party are not requested in the form. If a report is made anonymously, you will not need to provide any personal data about yourself and BCU will not know who has made the report. If any such information is shared, BCU will be limited in the action it is able to take. Where we cannot take any action against individuals, we will use information that is reported anonymously in order to monitor trends and patterns in reported behaviour. However, please note that any details relating to third parties that are included by the reporting party in their report will be stored on the system and retained in line with the BCU Retention Schedule.

In some cases the University may be required to investigate reports made anonymously as part of our duty of care to act. For example, if an anonymous report is received naming a 3rd party who had allegedly sexually assaulted a student, the University may be under a duty of care to act, regardless of whether the person making the complaint was named and/or wanted to be involved. This could be because the University owes an ongoing duty of care to other students who could be affected or put at risk. 

In addition, if an anonymous report was received about a staff member who was alleged to have sexually assaulted a student, we may again want to investigate as part of our duty of care to act and investigate with any details we have (e.g. we might know the department the staff member or student is in). An investigation would only usually be undertaken where it is deemed necessary and essential due to a significant risk or ongoing duty of care which the University must act upon. When making such decisions, the University will carefully consider the safety and wellbeing of all potentially affected individuals, as well as considering the reasons for making the anonymous report. 

Please note that while efforts have been made to ensure reporting parties are not identifiable when reporting anonymously, there is a possibility that certain information or the combinations of information may lead to the reporting party being identifiable. 

Reports with contact details

When you (the reporting party) submit a report with contact details, we may process the following personal data:

Your name, contact details and other basic information about you, such as your age, your gender, the department that you work or study in (where applicable) and/or your staff or student ID number (where applicable).

Your special category data, such as personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, personal data revealing religious or philosophical beliefs, data concerning health, data concerning a person’s sex life and data concerning a person’s sexual orientation.

Detail regarding your experience of bullying, harassment, sexual misconduct and other types of unacceptable behaviour.

Other information that is considered sensitive or private to the extent that it is relevant to the report.

We will also process the names and other identifiable information of other data subjects that are included in the report made by the reporting party. These will be individuals who are involved in the topic being reported (such as other staff or students, the alleged perpetrator where relevant or witnesses where relevant) combined with information that may fall within some or all of the above categories relating to those individuals.

The information may be collected from the reporting party as part of the initial report and/or may be collected by staff members during the processing of the report and is added to the system.

Part of the form to submit a report requests demographic data (including special category data) and we use that data in analytical reports for internal reporting purposes. The data is anonymised and the reported figures are done in a way that would not allow for the identification of any reporting party.

The lawful bases relevant for the processing of this personal information are:

• ‘public task’ (which means we are either carrying out a task in the exercise of official authority or in the public interest)
• ‘vital interest’ (which means in order to save a life)
• ‘contract’ (which means the processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with you to take steps at your request to enter into a contract)
• ‘legal obligation’ (which means we need to process the information to comply with the law)

Where other lawful bases / special conditions of processing do not apply, we will process your data on the basis of your explicit consent. This often applies for ‘special category data’. However, there are other lawful reasons for BCU to process special category data, which includes for equal opportunities purposes, to prevent the loss of life or to defend legal claims.

The purpose of the Report + Support tool is to allow staff and students to safely and, where appropriate, anonymously report any incidents of bullying, sexual assault, harassment and other types of unacceptable behaviour. The tool also allows for staff and students to report safeguarding concerns. Report + Support allows BCU to create a central record of reports in order to understand better what is happening within BCU’s University community. We can use the reports to understand what types of incident are happening in the University and thus inform our preventative work. If the reporting party provides their personal information in their report, we may use these details to contact the reporting party to discuss next steps. This will include identifying your options, and if you have named an individual we will let you know if we plan to make the reported person aware of the report. It is a case-by-case decision of whether we let the reporting party know that we intend to contact other parties that are mentioned in the report. We aim to make the reporting party aware of this where possible but it may not be possible or appropriate to do this in some cases.

We keep your personal information in line with BCU’s Retention Schedule. When the retention period has been reached, the personal information is securely destroyed. 

Once a report has been made, the information will be shared with a small group of relevant University staff from the Mental Health and Wellbeing team and/or HR, who will assess how best the University can respond. Reports are responded to by the administrator(s) or ‘assigned’ to one of a defined list of caseworkers as appropriate. The caseworkers are a small number of BCU staff predominantly within Mental Health & Wellbeing, but will include some HR staff so that staff cases can be assigned accordingly.

If you have chosen to provide your name a caseworker will then contact you to follow up on the report e.g. signpost to internal and external support services, discuss potential disciplinary action or advise on police reporting.

The content of the form will be accessible only to a very limited group of staff. Personal data stored electronically is on secure systems within the UK or EU.

We may share personal data with third parties where necessary. For example, where a report raises safeguarding concerns, we may share the data with third party organisations such as the police, the NHS mental health crisis team and Birmingham City University Student’s Union. We may also share the data with the police to confirm details on a report we have received. For example, if we received a report to say a student named Joe Bloggs was arrested the day previous, we may contact the police to ask them to confirm this.

In addition to the circumstances stated above we will share your personal information if we believe someone’s life is in danger or we believe we are compelled to by law.

Where criminal activity is reported, the reporting party would normally be advised to report to the police rather than the University making a report to the police. The University would only in exceptional circumstances report an alleged crime to the police contrary to the wishes of the reporting party. The circumstance in which a report by the University to the police may be justified is if disclosure of the information is necessary to protect the reporting party (or others) from harm or to prevent a further crime taking place but, in deciding whether to make such a disclosure and in deciding what information to disclose, the University will take into account any potential harm that the unauthorised disclosure may cause to the reporting party. This assessment will be undertaken on a case-by-case basis and will depend on the circumstances of the matter.

You have the right to correct or update your personal data at any time. Please get in touch with your main contact at the University to update your details. If you are a student, your main contact for this is your Faculty Student Centre. If you cannot contact them, please email informationmanagement@bcu.ac.uk to update your personal data. You may have the right to have your data deleted, the right to restrict processing, the right to object and / or the right to data portability and you have the right to know about and challenge automated decision making and profiling. Follow the links to find out whether those rights apply in these circumstances. To do any of those things or if you have followed the links but would like clarification, please email informationmanagement@bcu.ac.uk.

You have the right to request to see the personal data we hold about you. You can submit a Subject Access Request (SAR) in accordance with the Subject Access Requests (SAR) Procedure.

If you are not content with how we handle your information, please contact our Data Protection Officer to help you in the first instance using the contact details in the introduction to this privacy notice. If you are dissatisfied with the response, you also have the right to complain directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office. You can find out more about this on the ICO’s complaints website.

Birmingham City University’s Data Protection Policy and Appropriate Policy Document

Birmingham City University’s Privacy Notices

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) information for members of the public