Applications & the Admissions Process

We process the data provided in your application and further information provided by your referees for the purposes of evaluating your application to study at BU. The data will be managed by BU’s Admissions teams and will also be accessed by relevant individuals in BU’s Faculties if this is necessary to determine whether we are able to make you an offer to study at BU. In the case of apprenticeships, this will be handled by Faculty directly and the central apprenticeships team. Whereas, CPD courses are managed directly by the Faculty.

If you provide us with the details of a referee within or in connection with your application, we will process the personal data of those referees in order to contact them to request references or any further information required in relation to references already provided. We will not separately notify you before we contact your referees. We will process the information provided by referees along with other information in your application.

In the postgraduate research admissions process, we may share your application data with external individuals (in academic or other roles) for the purposes of assessing an application for use of an external supervisor, or for studentships with funding from external organisations such as NHS or private sector companies. We will not separately notify you before we share your data in this way. We will process this information along with other information in your application.

If we have doubts about the validity of any qualifications you have listed in your application or questions about the content or level of your qualifications, we will usually share information in your application with third parties for the purposes of understanding and verifying your qualifications. This may include the organisation identified as having awarded a qualification, any external agency which provides a qualification checking service or UK Naric (the UK National Recognition Information Centre), which is contracted by the UK Department for Education to provide an official source of information on international education and training systems, and international qualifications and skills.

The information in your application form and references will be processed as required to apply our Admissions policies and processes. Within BU we will use it for the purposes of applying those policies and procedures. Applications received (or the information provided within applications) is stored in our SITS record system or in a separate system for health and social care CPD courses and apprenticeships. If you come to study at BU then information originally provided in your application may later also be processed as described in the Student Privacy Notice.

• Necessary for the legitimate interest of processing your application

• Necessary for performance of BU’s public task as a higher education corporation, to apply our academic standards for admission with a view to providing you with higher education

• Necessary in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract, i.e. in order to apply our admissions process with a view to you entering into our student agreement

When you have made an application to study at BU we will use the contact details provided on your application to send you information related to your application and your potential future study at BU.

Our Admissions team will contact you as necessary for the conduct of the admissions process. In the case of apprenticeships and CPD this may be the Faculty or the central Apprenticeships team.  

As well as contacting you as part of the Admissions process, we also like to keep in touch by sending you other information, e.g. about the course you’ve applied for or events which may be interesting or helpful to you. The content of these email communications will be relevant to you. However you can choose to opt out of receiving these additional communications.

The communications from our Admissions team/Faculty/Apprenticeships team will include information about the progress of your application or steps you need to take in relation to your application (e.g. providing more information or attending an interview). They also include communication of our Admissions decisions i.e. whether we can offer you a place and the type of offer we are making. These communications will usually be sent by email, but on occasion we may need to telephone you or send you an SMS message. You cannot opt out of these communications as we need to be able to contact you about your application.

• Necessary in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract, i.e. in order to apply our admissions process with a view to you entering into our student agreement and enable you to access other services

• Necessary for BU’s core public task as a university, operating an admissions process to ensure that places on higher education courses are offered to the most appropriate candidates

The additional communications we send you will include details of relevant BU events such as Open Days and information about the course or Faculty to which you’ve applied. These communications will be in the form of emails and SMS from our Marketing & Communication department. You can opt out of receiving these emails by clicking the “unsubscribe” button on any email you receive from the address [email protected] or by emailing our Future Students Enquiry Team [email protected]. Opting out of these additional communications will not affect our handling of your application in any way.

• Necessary for the legitimate interest of processing your application, ensuring you have relevant information about your potential future study at BU and ensuring you will be able to access relevant associated services.

• Consent: you have agreed to this processing (if you do not opt out).

At the application stage we do not ask for or process within BU any information about matters on your criminal record.

As part of the UCAS process, applicants to regulated professions courses (i.e. courses intended to lead to registration with a regulated health or social care profession) are asked by UCAS to complete a relevant criminal matters declaration on the UCAS application form. However BU does not consider or take any account of this declaration within its admissions process unless and until BU has offered a place to the applicant and you have decided to accept the offer. At this point we ask offer-holders to declare certain criminal matters/convictions to BU: what you are asked to declare will depend on the course on which you’ve been offered a place. Please see below for more information.

Your data processed within our admissions process at BU includes any information which you provide in your application or otherwise within these categories:

• Indicators of potential educational disadvantage and other widening participation factors, including whether you are a care-leaver

Under our AccessBU scheme, when assessing applications for undergraduate courses (including undergraduate apprenticeships) we take into account a number of factors which may have affected applicants’ access to education or previous academic performance. We make contextual offers to applicants who fall into one or more of the automatically-assessed categories listed on the AccessBU website (see the “Eligibility” section at www.bournemouth.ac.uk/accessbu) or who submit an AccessBU application and supporting evidence to demonstrate how their personal circumstances have had a negative impact on their post-16 studies or performance at GCSE. This is in line with our Admissions policy and our Access & Participation Plan (as approved by OfS). If you are a care-leaver, if you are offered a place at BU this information will also be shared with our Student Services department so that they can determine what support BU may be able to provide with your studies and living arrangements.

• Necessary for compliance with a legal obligation on BU: compliance with Office for Student regulatory requirements to implement an approved Access & Participation plan, to increase access to higher education for currently under-represented categories of potential student

• Necessary for the performance of BU’s core public tasks: ensuring fair access to our higher education provision and widening participation in higher education, in accordance with our Access and Participation Plan approved by the Office for Students

• Health conditions, disabilities and needs for additional support, if this information is provided to us in your application or during the admissions process

The UCAS application form and the BU application form give you an opportunity to provide information about any disability you may have. You (or your referees) may also choose to tell us about any health condition or other support need you may have if you have questions about how this may affect study at BU or the support we would be able to offer you, or this has affected your previous study and you would like us to take this into account in the admissions process as described above. We use this information for statistical purposes, to enable us to signpost applicants to sources of support and for admissions purposes as a factor indicating educational disadvantage, as described above and in of our Admissions Policy 3B. Otherwise, this information is not considered as part of the admissions process and does not affect BU’s decision on whether to offer you a place, except in the exceptional situation where we determine that a disability, health condition or other support need means that it will not be possible you to meet the mandatory requirements of the course for which you have applied, even if you meet the academic criteria for admission and even if BU makes all reasonable adjustments to meet your needs. Further details about this are provided below, where we describe the information, we ask you to provide when you accept an offer from BU.

• Consent: you have agreed to this processing.

• Ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity and religious beliefs

The UCAS application form and the BU application form collects ethnicity data from all applicants. The UCAS application form also collects data about your sexual orientation, gender identity and religious belief where you agree to provide it. This information is special category data, and it is only provided to us by UCAS after the completion of the application cycle. It is processed only for the purposes of equal opportunities monitoring and analysis, to meet our duties under the Equality Act 2010. BU does not use it to take any decision about you.

• Necessary for compliance with our legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010, in particular the public sector equality duty and our OfS conditions of registration

• Necessary for the purposes of substantial public interest, i.e. identifying or keeping under review the existence or absence of equality of opportunity or treatment as provided for in paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018

Where you apply to us through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service [UCAS], UCAS share with us your application and further information such as your examination results. Our response to your application will be shared by us with UCAS, who will communicate our decision to you. We are able to access your application and share information with UCAS through a secure portal system. Once we receive your application through UCAS, we will ask you to create an account within the BU myHub portal, which will use individual log-in details. The myHub system is part of the SITS records system which BU also uses to maintain student records. This enables you to monitor the progress of the admissions process and we will use the myHub portal to send you messages about your application.

Further information about processing of data within the UCAS process is provided in the UCAS privacy notices and the UCAS applicant terms, which are available on the UCAS website. These should have been brought to your attention when you were preparing and submitting your UCAS application.

• Necessary in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract, i.e. in order to apply our admissions process with a view to you receiving an offer and entering into our student agreement

Where you apply directly through the BU website, you will be directed to complete an online application form. At this point you will be asked to create an account within the BU myHub system which will use individual log-in details. The myHub system is part of the SITS records system which BU also uses to maintain student records. Creating a myHub account at the application stage enables you to save drafts and work on the form over time and submit it online. Once you have submitted your application, you can use the myHub portal to monitor the progress of the admissions process and we will use it to send you messages about your application.

If you agree, we may also use the information in your myHub account to contact you to offer support with completing an application and provide you with further information

When you create a myHub account for your application we will ask whether you agree to us reviewing the content of your account and contacting you. The purpose of the contact would be to offer support with your draft application and provide further information which might be relevant in association with your application. We will only contact you in this way if you agree to it.

• Necessary in order to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract, i.e. in order to apply our admissions process with a view to you receiving an offer and entering into our student agreement

• Consent: you have agreed to this processing

• Applications through Clearing

If you apply to BU through Clearing and have not submitted a UCAS application in the relevant application round, we will ask you to complete a Record of Prior Acceptance (RPA) form. The content of this is determined by UCAS and includes contact details, educational history and relevant criminal conviction information. The data is processed by UCAS and BU in order to manage the application process and determine whether BU will offer you a place.

• Applications made through other organisations (including applications for the LLM Legal Practice)

Applications for some courses are received via other organisations who provide a gateway for particular applicants or to access particular courses. This includes applications for the LLM in Legal Practice, applications for the PG Dip MA Social Work (Children & Families) and Health Visiting/School Nursing programmes which are made through the Department for Education and applicants through the Common App process established in the USA. Applications received in this way will usually need to be entered manually into BU’s SITS/myHub system and processed as set out above. You should receive separate privacy information from any relevant external organisation about the processing of your data within their systems.

• Applications to BU Partner bodies

Wiltshire College & University Centre operates under a franchise partnership arrangement with BU. It applies BU admissions criteria and the BU admissions policies. BU and Wiltshire College & University Centre will therefore share information within applications for study at Wiltshire College & University Centre as necessary to operate the admissions process, and this may include BU accessing your UCAS application through the UCAS data portal. BU processes this data on the same basis as any other application, as set out above.

Applications to other BU partner organisations are processed by the partners and BU does not have access to applicant personal data.

More information

The legal basis for processing these categories of processing is the same as the basis stated above for processing the same types of data in relation to applications generally.