Personal information charter

How the Student Loans Company keeps your information safe and confidential.

This charter sets out what you can expect from us when we ask for, or hold, your personal information. It also covers what we ask from you to help us keep your information up to date.

You can find detailed information about how and why we process your information in our privacy notice.

Types of information we hold

Most of the information we hold is collected during the initial application for student finance. Some examples are:

  • personal details (such as name and date of birth) belonging to the student/applicant
  • contact details (such as email address and telephone number)
  • financial information, such as National Insurance number and bank account details
  • address history
  • nationality and residency information
  • personal and financial information belonging to the students’ parents or partner

Whose information we hold

We use information from a variety of sources to carry out our work. Some examples are:

  • Students applying for student finance
  • Parents or partners of students who support applications with their household income information
  • Contact details of ‘alternative contacts’, given to us by students when they’re applying
  • Further and Higher Education Providers such as universities and colleges
  • Current and former employees

What we use your information for

We require information to help us:

  • determine whether applicants are eligible for student finance
  • process applications for student finance
  • calculate how much student finance applicants are eligible for
  • make payments to customers
  • maintain accurate and up-to-date records
  • answer queries that customers, their parents or partner might have in relation to their student finance application
  • process complaints and appeals submitted by customers
  • collect student loan repayments

In return we ask you to:

  • give us correct information
  • tell us if anything changes

This helps us make sure the information we hold is accurate and up to date.

Keeping your information safe

We take the issue of data protection and the security of our customers’ personal information very seriously. We have processes and safeguards in place to ensure that personal data is handled securely and in accordance with all legislative and regulatory requirements. Our staff follow security protocols and are trained regularly on how to keep information safe.

We’ll only process your information for specific purposes and when we’re not currently processing your information, we’ll continue to store it in a secure manner.

Why we continue to hold information after customers have finished or left their course

When customers take out a student loan, it’s likely that they’ll be making repayments towards it for several years after they’ve finished or left their course. This means we’ll hold on to the majority of their information until they’ve repaid their loan in full, or it’s been cancelled.

Our Records Management Policy involves key stages where information we hold on a customer’s record can be reduced through data minimisation/erasure activity. For example, six years after a customer has finished or left their course, or six years after a customer has fully paid off their loan. After a customer has received some non-repayable funding or has fully paid off their loan we’ll continue to hold a reduced amount of information on the customer, in the form of a ‘Lifetime’ record, ensuring that we’re only holding the necessary amount of data to fulfil our regulatory obligations under our Public Task and no more. A customer’s Lifetime record is held until 70 years after their date of birth, when their record will be fully erased from our systems.

For more information on  how long we keep your information, see SLCs Records Management Policy by visiting www.gov.uk/government/publications/slcs-data-retention-policy.

How to find out what information we hold for you

You have a right to request access to personal data that we hold on you by making a Data Subject Access Request (“DSAR”).

You have a range of specific rights that you can exercise under UK data protection legislation, find out more in our Data Subject Rights factsheet.

How to contact us

If you have any enquiries about how we handle your personal data, you can contact SLC by:

  • writing to:

Data Protection Officer
10 Clyde Place
Glasgow
G5 8DF

For independent advice about data protection, privacy and data sharing issues, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) by:

  • writing to:

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
SK9 5AF

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