Privacy Policy Notice

We are committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of all those who use our website and services. This privacy policy explains the various ways in which we collect personal information and data about users of our website. It also outlines what this information is used for, the steps we take to keep it secure, and the situations in which we may disclose this information to others.

By using the HFE website, you’re agreeing to be bound by the terms of this policy.
If you have any queries about this Policy Notice, please contact us at the following address: Health and Fitness Education, 7-8 Roundhouse Court, Barnes Wallis Way, Chorley, PR7 7JN. Alternatively, we can be contacted on our main office number – 0800 612 4067.

About Us

Health and Fitness Education Limited is an independent learning provider to the active leisure sector. HFE is a Registered Trademark of Health and Fitness Education Limited.
Our registered address is: Health and Fitness Education, 7 & 8 Roundhouse Court, Barnes Wallis Way, Buckshaw Business Centre, Chorley, Lancashire, PR7 7JN.

The Data Controller

Health and Fitness Education Limited is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (the ‘ICO’) as a data controller under registration reference Z2238970.

The ICO is the UK’s independent Regulatory Authority in relation to data protection and information rights. The ICO provides a helpline and complaints service and can be contacted at: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF or at www.ico.org.uk or by telephone on 0303 1231113.

When do we Collect Information?

We collect your personal information when you:

Complete an online enrolment form
Submit an enquiry about your interest in one of our courses
When you ask us for more information about a product or service we sell
When you submit a question of complaint about our products or services
Visit or browse our website
When you use the HFE app

We may also collect information about you from other organisations, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

What Information do we Collect?

The information we collect about you is only ever required to enable us to provide a fast and efficient service to you. Depending on the nature of the products or services that you are using, the information we collect will vary. This information includes:

Your name, date of birth, gender, e-mail address, postal address, telephone number, health status, learning needs and whether you require any reasonable adjustments to be made.
Credit or debit card information, although, we do not store your bank or credit card information. This information is not held by us as we use a third-party payment processor who securely capture and process one-off debit/credit card transactions. Our monthly payment plans also use recurring card payment.
Your contact with our staff, such as a notes or recordings of a call you make to us or we make to you, email or other digital communications you have with us.
Your enrolment information, such as courses/qualifications you are on, your learning activity, assessment activity, progress and dates of payment owed and received, the services you use and any other information related to your account

How do we use this Information?

We will use the personal information you provide to us to provide you with the services, products or information that you have requested. We may also use this information for administration purposes, to improve your online experience with our website, and/or for marketing purposes. Personal data/cookies may be used for personalization of ads. Please visit Google’s Privacy & Terms site to read more about how Google uses information collected from the HFE website.

From time-to-time, we may need to share your information with our service providers, associated organisations and other agents. This may be necessary to:

Process payments you have made
Collect payments from you
Notify you of important changes to our services and policies
Send you information about products and services you may be interested in
Carry out contractual obligations
Enable access to specific website services (for example the Learner Management System, Health and Fitness Appraisal – HFA)
Improve the products and services we provide, and to deliver a better website experience
The periods in which we retain personal information are reviewed on a regular basis.

There are certain types of information (for example invoicing and payments) that we are required to hold to fulfil our statutory obligations. Personal information is held securely on our systems for as long as it is necessary for the relevant activities.

Your data may also be shared with selected partners if you choose to use any of our secondary services, like CV Connect, or any offers, discounts or free products or services provided by our partners. You will always be informed in advance of any data transfer and in most cases, you will in fact initiate the introduction yourself (e.g. you will send your CV to a potential employer via our platform, you will redeem a discount code or voucher).

How Long We Store Your Information?

We will store your information for as long as you are a customer of Health and Fitness Education Limited. Following your achievement or cancellation, we will also need to store your information for a reasonable length of time in order to meet our legal and regulatory obligations, including compliance with awarding bodies, professional bodies, health and safety, financial audit, anti-fraud and money laundering regulations.

Typically, we will store your information for no more than 6 years from the last activity on the account. An ‘activity’ is classified as access to your course via our online learning platform, or a payment made to us for our products and services.

If you haven’t opted out of receiving marketing communications, we may contact you about our services during the 6 years following your last activity.

Basis of Lawful Processing

The legal basis that we rely on to collect, process, store and retain your personal information is as follows:

You have explicitly and voluntarily provided your personal information for the specified purpose of completing one of our training courses/qualifications;
The processing is necessary for the performance of the delivery of our training and assessment services to you;
The processing is necessary in order for us to comply with all our legal and regulatory responsibilities and duties;
The processing is necessary for our legitimate purposes, or that provided by a third party

Opting Out

We will only send you information relating to the training and education services that we provide to you, or other products and services that we offer and which we think you may be interested in. We will not share your data with any third parties for marketing purposes, unless you provide your explicit consent.

If you cancel your training course with us, we will only send you information that we think will be of interest to you. If you want to opt out of receiving marketing messages from us, please click the unsubscribe link in the email/communication from us and you will be opted out of all marketing communications.

The Use of Web Cookies

We use cookies, which are small text files stored in your browser (e.g. Chrome, Safari) and other similar technologies in order to anonymously follow your online activities and user journey. These cookies collect information that tells us how you use our websites, web-related products, and services, so that we can continue to make changes to our website that will improve your online experience. These cookies do not give us access to the rest of your computer or allow us to see your other web-based activities.

Cookies are essential to help us make our website more relevant to your interests and needs. We may use a persistent cookie (a cookie that stays linked to your browser) to record your details so we can recognise you if you visit our website again.
You can choose to refuse cookies, or set your browser to let you know each time a website tries to set a cookie.

Please note however that if you disable our cookies you may not be able to access certain services or facilities on our sites and your use of our sites may be restricted, including having the ability to submit enquiries or to enrol on future training courses.
For more information about cookies, please refer to our cookie policy.

Disclosure of Your Information to Third-Parties

From time-to-time, it may be necessary for us to share information about you with:

Service providers (e.g. web developers, awarding bodies), regulators (accreditation bodies, government agencies) and associated organisations to allow us to service your training and education; for example, payment processors and merchant providers to process payments, or, our freelance tutors who deliver our training courses.
Law enforcement organisations, regulatory organisations, courts or other public authorities where we have a legal obligation to do so.
Corporate partners – if you enrolled via one of our corporate partners, for example, a University, we may share information about your enrolment with that partner so that they are aware of the success of the partnership. We will never share sensitive information, or detailed information about your achievements status or results.

If we are restructured or sold to another organisation, we may transfer any personal information we hold about you to that organisation. We will inform you if we do.

Third-Party Tracking

We use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Adwords for collecting personal data about our website visitor’s online activities over time and across different web sites for marketing purposes and ad personalisation. This is so we can ensure that our website provides you with the best online experience.

For more information about these tracking services, including how to opt out from this, please visit our cookie policy.

How We Keep Your Data Safe?

We take reasonable measures to prevent the loss, theft, misuse or alteration of your personal information. These methods include regular backups of data, encryption of data and secure password protection policies on any and all systems handling your personal information. Whenever we transfer your data between systems or for the purpose of a backup, we always use secure file transfer protocols (SFTP).

In cases where you have been provided with a password and login details, for example, to access our Learner Management System, you are solely responsible for keeping this password confidential. We greatly encourage you not to share this information with anyone else, including our own staff.

How Can I Access and Update My Information?

In order to provide you with the best possible levels of service, it’s important your information is kept accurate and up to date. If any of the information we hold about you changes at any time, please email us on [email protected] as soon as possible so it can be updated.

You have the right to access a copy of the information we hold about you for free. Any requests must be made in writing and we will respond within one month. Complex or numerous requests may take longer than one month to respond to and may incur a charge for this information to be provided to you. Please note that certain types of information, such as anonymised data (covered below) cannot be provided.

Your Privacy Rights

In accordance with the principles of the Data Protection Act (2018), which is the UK’s implementation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have a number of rights in relation to your data privacy: the right of access; the right of rectification; the right of erasure (the “right to be forgotten”); the right to restriction of processing; the right to be notified; the right to data portability; the right of objection; and the right to not be subject to automated profiling.

Access. You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies in your information corrected.
Rectification. If you believe we are holding inaccurate information about you, or your personal details change, please contact us via email or in writing at the address below.
Erasure. You have the right to the erasure of the data we hold on you, when it is no longer needed for the purposes of your Membership, or when you withdraw your consent for our processing (and we have no other lawful basis to hold your data).
Restriction. You have the right to ask us to place restrictions on processing your data in certain circumstances.
Notification. You have the right to be notified of any rectification, erasure or restrictions in relation to your personal data.
Portability. You have a right to receive the data we hold on you electronically in a format that allows it to be easily transferred to another data controller.
Object. You have the right to object to data processing of your personal data for direct marketing or profiling purposes.
Profiling. You have the right not to be subject to any decision based on automatic processing of your personal data.

If you would like to address any issue relating to your personal information, please contact us via email ([email protected]) or in writing at our registered address: 7-8 Roundhouse Court, Barnes Wallis Way, Chorley, Lancashire, PR7 7JN.

Research Data

We do occasionally introduce products and services on our website for the purpose of research and data collection. These can include, but are not limited to, questionnaires, quizzes, mock exams, calculators, and other web-based applications designed to provide users with a free online resource.

The main purpose of conducting this research is to enable us to produce better and more useful products or resources in the future, or so that we can publish our findings of our research to industry or academia, as appropriate.

Therefore, data collected from these web-based applications may be used to form part of a wider research project, the findings of which may be presented in an industry publication, at a conference or in a separate report.

Raw data collected for research purposes:

is always collected and stored in an anonymised format – none of our data would identify a participant
never requires participants to supply contact details to access the product/service
is encrypted and stored securely in accordance with HFE’s strict data security procedures
is only accessed and used by those HFE employees who need access to it to perform their duties

Published data will typically only include data samples that have been statistically analysed (e.g. mean, standard deviation, ranges etc) and will not include raw data.
Many of the rights (e.g. to be informed, have access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability etc) of research participants under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and/or Data Protection Act (2018) do not apply to data being used for research purposes. Additionally, due to the redacted and anonymised way in which our data is collected, it is not possible to identify which data belongs to which individual. Therefore, we are very often unable to fulfil requests for access to such data. However, we will always try to support, guide and re-assure participants making such requests.

Data is periodically delated/erased and it is never stored for any longer than the period in which it is used.

If you do wish to know more about how our research data is used, please contact us at [email protected] and a member of the team will connect you with the appropriate member of the HFE team.

Changes to This Privacy Notice

We will update this privacy notice to reflect the way in which we process and protect your data. If we do so, we will contact all our customers and publish a notice on our website so that you will have the opportunity to adjust your communications preferences.

Version 2.4:
Last revised: 09/03/2023