Updated 17th April 2023.
At DPG, we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.
This policy explains who we are, what, when and why we collect personal information, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure.
Any questions regarding this policy and our privacy practices should be sent:
By email to courses@dpglearn.co.uk
By phone to 0330 828 2392
By post to DPG, 7 West Nile St, Glasgow G1 2PR
We’re DPG, one of the world's most experienced distance learning organisations. Our aim is to make learning as accessible as possible in a way that lets you decide when, where and how you learn.
DPG Limited is a company incorporated and registered in England under company number 02708805.
We are also a registered as a data controller with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under registration number C1328993.
Our registered office at DPG Limited, 3rd Floor, Ashley Road, Altrincham, United Kingdom, WA14 2DT.
Information is provided to DPG by:
When you submit your details to us through an enquiry on our website [or a trusted third party], we’ll collect the following information:
When you speak to our course advisors or enrol on a course, we may ask for the following information:
If a third party is paying for your course then we will ask them for the following information:
When you are studying, we may collect the following information about you:
When you enrol as a student, we’ll ask if you have any special educational requirements that might require us to make adjustments to the course or assessments. We ask this so that we can take reasonable steps to accommodate your needs and give you the best student experience possible. Any such health information is known as special category personal data under data protection laws. We may share this with our Awarding bodies so that they can take your requirements into consideration when setting assignments or exams.
This information will only be used to help you.
As with all your data, you can ask us to delete or modify this information at any time. Please see further information about your privacy rights below.
Under data protection law, we can only use your personal information if we have a proper reason for doing so, e.g.:
to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations;
A legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your information, so long as this is not overridden by your own rights and interests.
The list below explains what we use (process) your personal information for and our legal basis for doing so:
Students: If you are a student, our processing of your personal data is necessary for the performance of our contract with you, i.e. to provide you with the course you have enrolled on. If you do not provide us with certain personal information that we request when you apply for one of our courses, then we may not be able to offer this course to you. We will seek your consent to process any special categories of personal data (such as health information) that we may request when you apply for one of our courses.
Enquiries and Feedback: We use personal information submitted to us when you make an enquiry or when you provide feedback to us for our legitimate interests of engaging with potential students and identifying how we can improve our services.
Job Applications: We collect personal information in the context of processing job applications as necessary to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations to ensure that our application processes comply with applicable laws, and also for our legitimate interests to ensure that candidates are appropriately qualified and suitable for working with us. Such processing may also be necessary for us to take steps before entering into an employment contract with a candidate.
Business Contacts: We use personal contact details of business contacts (including agents, contractors and individuals that represent our suppliers and business partners) for our own legitimate interests of running our business.
Website: The technical information gathered from the use of our website (including through our use of cookies) which may include personal data, is used for our legitimate interest of ensuring that our website is functioning properly and to help us make business decisions about the information to be provided on our website.
Marketing: We may use your personal information to send you updates about our services, including exclusive offers, promotions or new courses. We have a legitimate interest in processing your personal information for marketing purposes. This means we do not usually need your consent to send you marketing communications. However, where consent is needed, we will ask for this consent separately. You have the right to opt out of receiving marketing communications at any time (please see "How to unsubscribe from marketing communications" below). We will always treat your personal information with utmost respect and never share it with other organisations for marketing purposes.
If you submit your details as a prospective student, we’ll store this data for 3 years.
If you enrol as a student, we’ll store your data for 7 years after the completion of your course in line with regulatory and governing body requirements, where there may be a requirement to hold your data to evidence the completion of your studies or for audit purposes.
Technical information about your visit to our website may be kept for the following retention periods:
For more information about how long we keep your data, please contact us at the details above.
We take your privacy and security very seriously and take appropriate measures to ensure that your data is protected from misuse.
We have an ongoing programme of improvement and development in order to protect your personal data from unauthorised access, accidental loss and/or destruction.
We use the following security measures to protect your data:
Please be aware that communications over the internet, such as e-mails/instant messaging, are not secure unless they have been encrypted. We cannot accept responsibility for any unauthorised access or loss of personal information that is beyond our control.
In order to provide and improve our services, we may share relevant information with the following third parties. All of our third parties are trusted and take appropriate measures to ensure your data is secure.
We may also share your information if:
Coursework and assessment submissions will only be shared securely based on the terms of the student agreement; for example, with a designated person or department in the relevant Awarding Organisation.
Technical information gathered about your use of our website may be shared with Google Analytics. We work with Google Analytics to automatically collect information including: IP address; MAC (Media Access Control) address; unique identifier or other persistent or non-persistent device identifier; device software platform and firmware, mobile phone carrier and geolocation data to help us understand your use of our website such as how often you return, what parts of the website you visit, how you use the website and how long you spend on the website. This third party provider is prohibited from using our data for any other purposes. Go to https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html to read the Google Analytics Privacy Policy.
This is relevant as countries outside the EEA and UK are not bound by the same data protection regulations as those within the EEA and UK.
The European Economic Area (EEA) includes the EU member states plus Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein, and is covered by the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
Your data might be shared with the non-EEA or UK companies below contracted to provide a service to us. We trust these companies with your data because they’ve ensured that their data protection measures are at least as extensive as those required within the EEA and UK by GDPR.
You can view these companies’ privacy policies here:
vwo platform security compliance gdpr policy
Under data protection laws, you have many rights regarding your personal data which may generally be exercised free of charge. These include the right to:
For full information on your rights, including how and when they apply, please contact us or seek guidance from the ICO.
You can exercise any of these rights by emailing contact@dpglearn.co.uk, by phoning 0330 828 2392 or by writing to DPG, 7 West Nile St, Glasgow G1 2PR and providing the following information:
If for any reason you’d like us to delete or modify your data, or opt-out of any communications, you can do this for free. Contact us at courses@dpglearn.co.uk and we’ll meet your request within one month.
However, you should be aware that we may not be able to delete your personal data if there is a legitimate reason for us to continue to hold your data; for example, we may continue to hold personal data where we are under a legal obligation to do so, or where such information may need to be used by us in the exercise or defence of any legal claim.
You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold on you at any time, free of charge, by contacting us on courses@dpglearn.co.uk. We’ll respond within one month.
To opt out of our emails or other marketing communications, click the ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom of any email or text "STOP" in response to any marketing text message we send you.
To opt out of us sharing details with Facebook that you have submitted through our website or as part of your enrolment process, email contact@dpglearn.co.uk.
We’ll do our best to resolve any complaint or question you have about the data you store with us.
If you believe we’ve breached data protection laws, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the relevant supervisory body where you work, live, or where the alleged breach occurred.
In the UK, this is the ICO, which can be reached here or by phone on 0303 123 1111.
We will keep this policy under review and any changes made from time to time will be posted on this page.
Please check back regularly to keep informed of updates or changes to this privacy statement. We will notify any significant changes via an announcement on our website.
Information will be provided to us by:
We may collect the following information:
When you speak to our course advisors or enrol on a course, we may ask for the following information:
We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with a better service, and for the following reasons:
We only use your personal information if we have a proper reason for doing so. For instance, where you have given consent for it to be used; to comply with legal and regulatory obligations; for our legitimate interests or those of a third party when we have a business or commercial reason to use your data. Below are reasons for why we may use your personal information:
We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.
A cookie is a small file which asks permission to be placed on your computer’s hard drive. Once you agree, the file is added, and the cookie helps analyse web traffic or lets you know when you visit a particular site. Cookies allow web applications to respond to you as an individual. The web application can tailor its operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.
We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to customer needs.
Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us.
You can choose to accept or decline cookies. If you decline this may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.
Necessary Cookies:
Name: _GRECAPTCHA
Provider: google.com
Description: This cookie is set by Google reCaptcha, which protects our site against SPAM enquiries on contact forms within our site
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: 6 months
Path: /recaptcha
Name: _cookieconsent_status
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Determines whether the visitor has accepted the cookie consent box
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to Ireland
Name: JSESSIONID
Provider: metrics.responsetap.com
Description: Preserves user states across page requests
Type: HTTP
Expiry: Session
Data is sent to: Data is sent to UK
Name: LPSID-29939148
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Current active (or last) monitoring session (Live Person for web chat engagements)
Expiry: Session
Name: LPVID
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Current active (or last) monitoring session (Live Person for web chat engagements)
Expiry: Session
Type: Visitor ID as identified in Conversational Cloud. Identifies a browser as long as cookie is not delete
VWO Cookies – these cookies are set by a tool ICS Learn currently use to A/B test new versions of existing pages
Name: _vis_opt_s
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie tracks session created for a visitor, i.e., the number of times the browser was closed and reopened. The value is >=1, followed by a pipe sign. For example, the value of 2 indicates that the visitor restarted the browser once while 3 means twice
Expiry: 100 days
Name: _vis_opt_test_cookie
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is created to detect if the cookies are enabled on the visitor’s browser or not. It also helps in tracking the number of browser sessions a visitor has gone through. The value of this cookie is always 1
Type: Session
Name: _vwo_ds
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie stores persistent user-level data for VWO Insights
Expiry: 100 days
Name: _vwo_sn
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie stores session-level information
Type: Session
Name: _vwo_uuid
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk Description: This cookie generates a unique id for every visitor and is used for the report segmentation feature in VWO, and it also allows you to view data in a more refined manner
Expiry: 10 years
Preferences related cookies:
Name: lang
Provider: ads.linkedin.com
Description: Remembers the users selected language version of a website
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: Session
Data is sent to: Data is sent to Ireland
Name: lang
Provider: linkedin.com
Description: Set by LinkedIn when a web page contains an embedded ‘Follow Us’ panel
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: Session
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: li_gc
Provider: linkedin.com
Description: Used to store consent of guests regarding the use of cookies for non-essential purposes
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: 2 years
Statistics related cookies:
Name: AnalyticsSyncHistory
Provider: .linkedin.com
Description: Used to store information about the time a sync with the lms_analytics cookie took place for users in the Designated Countries
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: 30 days
Name: _uetsid
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is used by Bing to gather anonymous information on how visitors are using websites
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: 1 days
Name: _uetvid
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is used by Bing to gather anonymous information on how visitors are using websites
Type: HTTPS
Expiry: 30 days
Name: _dc_gtm_UA-39483992-12
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Used by Google Tag Manager to control loading of a Google Analytics script tag Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 day
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _ga
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website Type: HTTP
Expiry: 2 years
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _gid
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _vwo_uuid_v2
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is set to make split-test on the website, which optimizes the websites relevance towards the visitor – cookie can also be set to improve the visitors experience
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to UK
Name: li_alerts
Provider: linkedin.com
Description: Used to track impressions of LinkedIn alerts, such as the Cookie Banner and to implement cool off periods for display of alerts
Expiry: 1 year
Marketing related cookies:
Name: _biz_nA
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Collects data on sites visitors preferences and behaviour on the website. This information is used to make content and advertising more relevant.
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _biz_pendingA
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Collects data on sites visitors preferences and behaviour on the website. This information is used to make content and advertising more relevant.
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _biz_sid
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Collects data on sites visitors preferences and behaviour on the website. This information is used to make content and advertising more relevant.
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 day
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _biz_uid
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Collects data on sites visitors preferences and behaviour on the website. This information is used to make content and advertising more relevant.
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _BUID
Provider: .bizible.com
Description: Collects data on sites visitors preferences and behaviour on the website. This information is used to make content and advertising more relevant.
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: _gcl_au
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Used by Google AdSense for experimenting with advertisement efficiency across websites user their services
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 3 Months
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: bcookie
Provider: LinkedIn.com
Description: Used by the social networking service linkedin, for tracking the use of embedded services
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 2 Years
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: bscookie
Provider: LinkedIn.com
Description: Used by the social networking service linkedin, for tracking the use of embedded services
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 2 Years
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: lidc
Provider: LinkedIn.com
Description: Used by the social networking service, LinkedIn, for tracking the use of embedded services
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Day
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: MUID
Provider: bing.com
Description: Used by Microsoft as a unique user ID. The cookie enables user tracking by synchronising the ID across many Microsoft domains
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: UserMatchHistory
Provider: LinkedIn.com
Description: Used to track visitors on multiple websites, in order to present relevant advertisement based on the visitor’s preferences
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 30 Days
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: IDE
Provider: doubleclick.net
Description: Used by the social networking service linkedin, for tracking the use of embedded services
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Other cookies:
Name: lidc
Provider: .linkedin.com
Description: To facilitate data center selection
Expiry: 1 day
Name: biz_flagsA
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: Statistics and tracking cookie to determine how visitors interact with the website Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: adiLP
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is used to track and link website visitor behaviour to telephone calls made by the visitor using the dynamic phone number generated which is unique to them
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Day
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: adiS
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is used to track and link website visitor behaviour to telephone calls made by the visitor using the dynamic phone number generated which is unique to them
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Day
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: adiV
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is used to track and link website visitor behaviour to telephone calls made by the visitor using the dynamic phone number generated which is unique to them
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Year
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Name: adiVi
Provider: .dpglearn.co.uk
Description: This cookie is used to track and link website visitor behaviour to telephone calls made by the visitor using the dynamic phone number generated which is unique to them
Type: HTTP
Expiry: 1 Day
Data is sent to: Data is sent to US
Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.
We use the data you give us about yourself to ensure that when you visit the site, you don’t miss the offers and information relevant to you.
We and our reputable third-party companies will collect website usage information about visitors to our website for the purposes of statistical analysis, sales and marketing research, tracking page usage and paths used by visitors through our site, targeting the site content, targeting our marketing campaigns and direct marketing emails, targeting our internet banner advertisements on our website and on other websites and tracking use of our internet banner advertisements and other links from our marketing partners’ websites to our website.
For this purpose, we and our third-party companies note information on the path you take to get to our site and on some of the pages you visit on our website through the use of cookies.
We may use this information to undertake sales and marketing research and to tailor our site, our marketing campaigns and email communications specifically to you, and your recent activity on our site.
We may use your data to communicate information we think may interest you.
DPG will only collect, process and store information about you that we have collected from you with your consent. Personal data is not captured or stored through the DPG website without your prior consent.
We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so.
Whenever you receive direct marketing you will have the option to unsubscribe. You can also contact us directly if you wish for us to stop sending direct marketing to you: marketing@dpglearn.co.uk
If your details change, please resubmit them on the site and our records will reflect your new details. You can also contact us on courses@dpglearn.co.uk to notify us of any changes.
Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you may request a copy of any personal data about you held by us and we must reply within one calendar month.
The request can be made verbally, electronically by email or in writing.
Under General Data Protection Regulation laws (GDPR), you have rights regarding your personal data which may generally be exercised free of charge. These include the right to:
For full information on your rights, including how and when they apply, please see the ICO website.
The DPG Academic Policy Handbook gives formal notice and explanation to the policies and procedures written and agreed by key stakeholders within the business. This Academic Policy Handbook, ‘APH’, provides clear guidance to the expectations of students and DPG whilst undertaking your studies. The APH is written in conjunction with and supported by both the student contract and DPG Quality and Performance Framework.
The DPG Community Policy covers our privacy policy for the DPG Professional Development Community.