This Privacy Notice, together with our Cookies Policy, sets out the ways in which HODDER & STOUGHTON LIMITED (on behalf of its business division HODDER EDUCATION) (we, us, our) collect, use and share your personal information in connection with our publishing business. It also explains what rights you have to access or change your personal information.

This Privacy Notice applies to the processing of your personal information and personally identifiable information which is information that can be used on its own or with other data to identify, contact, or locate a person (for example your name or an online identifier) (“personal data”).  So if you provide feedback or a review or contribute to a blog or provide other user generated content to us it may include personal data.

We take your privacy and our responsibility to protect your information seriously and will take care in use and handling of your personal data.

Hodder Education Products and Services

Hodder Education publishes education products and provides educational services (collectively “a/our Service/s” and individually “a/our product/s” and “a/our digital platform/s”) for example: 
BOOST, BOOST INSIGHTS/MARK, PIRA, PUMA, ART, AMT, SNAP MATHS and SHINE INTERVENTIONS 

The way that Hodder Education collects and processes your personal data differs depending on how you interact with Hodder Education and the type of Service that you are using. 

Different Users

The way we process your personal data also varies depending on the kind of user you are, for example, whether you are a teacher, parent, learner, customer, or content contributor such as authors and illustrators. 

In the case of most of the processing activities described in this Privacy Notice we are acting as a data controller for your personal data as we decide how your personal data is used and protected. 

That said, if you are a learner using a Service or product provided by us via your school or other educational institution (your “Educational Institution”), we are acting as a data processor for your personal data. This is the case where we process your data on behalf of your Educational Institution (which is the data controller for your personal data) as part of providing a Service to your Educational Institution. The terms and conditions for our Services provide further mandatory information about our data processing activities when we are acting as a data processor. 

Separately and in relation to specific processing activities related to research and product development, we act as a data controller for the data we collect when you use our Services. We provide more details on this in Children’s Use of Our Services – General and How We Use Your Personal Data.

If you are a learner using any of our Services through your Educational Institution, or a child reading this Privacy Notice, please read Children’s Use of Our Services – for Learners of this Privacy Notice for further details on how we use your information.

If you are a parent or guardian and you wish to obtain further information on how Hodder Education processes the personal data of children as part of its Services, please read Children’s Use of Our Services – General of this Privacy Notice. 

Read our Privacy Notice to understand:

• Who we are
• Children's use of our services
• What personal data we collect about you
• How we use your personal data
• Who can see your personal data 
• When we share your personal data
• How we look after your personal data
• How long we keep your personal data
• International transfers of your personal data
• Automated decision making
• Your rights and choices

Who we are

Hodder Education is a business division of Hodder & Stoughton Limited, which is part of the Hachette UK Group of companies. (See Group Company List). 

Hodder & Stoughton Limited is a company registered in England (under company number 00651692) with our registered address as set out below.

You can contact us as follows:
FAO: HEAD OF DATA PROTECTION
Address: Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DZ, UK
Email: privacy@hoddereducation.co.uk 

Children's use of our services

For Learners

Are you under 18 and want to buy a product?

• Please do not use the following Hodder Education website without the supervision of your parent, guardian or teacher: www.hoddereducation.com.
• Your parent, guardian or teacher will need to buy Hodder Education products or services on your behalf (e.g. a text book).

Are you using our digital platforms provided by your school?

• Hodder Education will process information about you that your school provides to us so you can use the digital platforms.
• E.g. if you do a test on a digital platform or respond to a questionnaire, then your answers and details about you (like your name and birthday) are stored by Hodder Education so that the school has a record of your answers.
• We store this type of information when your school uses our services to help you with your studies.
• We also use some of your information if we need it for research and development purposes, including to create educational resources and reports based on the test results on our digital platforms (e.g. a report on how a year group has performed on a test across different schools).
• Generally, we keep your information for as long as your school needs it. After that, we either delete it completely or remove identifying details.

Do you have questions?

• Speak to your parent, guardian or teacher if you don’t understand anything in this Privacy Notice. 
• We have an agreement with your school and follow its instructions when we use information about you. You can find out more about this in your school’s privacy notice.
• Speak with your teacher if you have any other questions or if you are unhappy about anything related to your use of a Hodder Education service.
• To contact us directly, you can find our contact details in Who We Are.

General

Where any Hodder Education Services are provided to an Educational Institution and personal data belonging to a learner is shared with us so that learners can access our Services, the learner’s Educational Institution continues to be the data controller for the learner’s personal data as described above. 

In such cases we rely on the Educational Institution (i.e. the data controller) to instruct and/or supervise their learners, and keep parents or guardians informed (where necessary). Please consult your Educational Institution's privacy notice for more information. Where we act as a data processor for an Educational Institution, we will process learners’ personal data as needed to provide our Services to the Educational Institution in accordance with their instructions. For example, we process learners’ personal data for the purposes of: 

• supporting their learning; 
• marking assessments;
• recording assessment results; and 
• monitoring and reporting on their progress to their Educational Institution.  

We will not give learners’ personal data to any third parties without the authorisation of your Educational Institution in these circumstances.  Where possible we will de-identify data by removing the personal data of learners from the data we are processing or by replacing it. In some cases the data we use will be pseudonymous and in others it will be anonymous (together “de-identified data”).

Hodder Education uses de-identified data for the following purposes as a separate data controller:

• standardisation and product development purposes;
• benchmarking purposes; 
• quality assurance and impact assessment purposes; and
• research purposes, e.g. to prepare aggregated and anonymised reporting on trends, academic achievement, performance indicators, and attitudes to learning in educational institutions nationwide or internationally.

Reports and products we create for the above purposes do not contain any information that would enable any third party recipient to contact, locate or identify learners or individual Educational Institutions. You can find more details about this in How We Use Your Personal Data.
 

What personal data we collect about you

Provided by you

We collect personal data from you directly when you:

• set up an account with us;
• subscribe to or access our Services (including taking part in trials);
• order our products;
• subscribe to or purchase our magazines;
• apply for an inspection copy of a textbook;
• contact us for customer support or technical assistance with our Services;  
• subscribe to our newsletters or eUpdates, or otherwise request access to marketing materials related to our Services;
• interact or correspond with us by letter, phone, SMS, email or via our website;
• help us with market research, for instance focus groups or surveys;
• visit our e-commerce websites or use our Services;
• sign up to attend events, including conferences and webinars that we host for professional development and revisions purposes, or when you otherwise interact with Hodder Education representatives in person;
• submit contributions to our publications by post or via our website or our author contact form;
• enter into a contract with us to provide content for any of our products or services;
• enter a competition or prize draw;
• submit permission requests;
• apply for electronical materials for visually impaired and print disabled materials; or
• participate in recorded video conferences.

During your interaction with us in connection with our Services, you may provide information to us, such as:

• your personal contact details, such as your name, personal email address, phone number, residential address;
• your professional contact details, such as your job title, school or other educational institution contact address, or work email address;
• if you have ordered a product or service from us – your payment and delivery details;
• if you are a learner – your name, school email address, date of birth, information contained in questionnaires and assessments you complete via our Services; 
• if you are a parent/carer – your name and relationship to learner;
• if you have created an account with us – your log-in details including passwords;
• if you are providing content for our products or digital platforms – information about your academic and work history, references and any other information you may choose to supply (including your financial details if we will be paying you); 
• if you have signed up for newsletters, eUpdates or other marketing materials – details about the subjects or our Services that you are interested in;
• if you have corresponded with us (e.g. by email, customer support query, survey response or via our website) then details of your correspondence, query or response;
• video or voice recordings when you participate in recorded webinars or conferences; or
• Social media names.

For more information on how we process job applicants’ personal data, please see our Privacy Notice for Job Applicants.

We also collect certain types of personal data automatically when you use our digital platforms and our e-commerce website and apps.  We process information about how you use our digital platforms, website and apps and the device that you use to access them. This includes your IP address, geographical location, device information (such as your hardware model, mobile network information, unique device identifiers), browser type, referral source, length of visit to the website, number of page reviews, the search queries you make on the website and similar information. This information is may be collected by Google Analytics on our behalf and by other apps and plugins provided by third parties (such as Meta) using cookies and similar technology that we incorporate into our website.  To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, visit:
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. 

For more information on cookies please read our Cookies Policy.
 

Special category data

You may provide us with more sensitive information, such as details about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious, philosophical or similar beliefs, trade union membership, genetics, biometrics, health, sexual life, sexual orientation or about criminal offences or proceedings (some of which is defined as ‘special category data’ under data protection laws) (Sensitive Information). 

Sensitive Information may be processed by us on behalf of Educational Institutions. We do not generally use Sensitive Information for our own purposes. However, we may process Sensitive Information for our own purposes in limited circumstances – for example, where necessary for research purposes, to help us ensure equality of opportunity or treatment or where it is necessary for things like public health.  We process and manage Sensitive Information differently in accordance with data protection laws and we or your Educational Institution will explain further before collecting such data.

Changes to your personal details

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us (e.g. if you have new contact details). 

Third Party Links

Our website may include links to third party websites, plug-ins and applications. By clicking on those links or enabling these connections you may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices. Please ensure that you read the privacy notices on any such external websites.

Provided to us by third parties

In certain circumstances, we receive your personal data from third parties. For example, we receive information: 

• from third party providers – to verify information provided by you in connection with any content you submit to us for publication (e.g. where we use third-party databases or websites to confirm your publication history);
• from third parties – if they are referring you to us for publication (e.g. if you are the co-author of a manuscript, your co-author will be required to provide us with information about you, or if you have a literary agent making submissions on your behalf, your agent will provide us with information about you);
• from your colleagues – if you are added as a teacher, teacher administrator or an access co-ordinator user to one of our digital platforms, such as Boost Insights or Boost;   
• from Educational Institutions – when they are arranging access for learners to our digital platforms, details of learners, including names, school, school email address, country, age, date of birth, gender, traveller status, first language, Unique Pupil Number, pupil premium status, SEN status and information contained in questionnaires you complete about learners via our Services;
• from a parent/carer – details of learners, including name, date of birth and information contained in questionnaires you complete about learners via our Services;
• by subscribing to online secure password protected databases of education data from The Education Company Ltd and ISC Research which contains up to date information about schools and institutions and their teaching staff, including professional contact details for the UK and internationally respectively; 
• if you give permission for us to contact you to a bookseller or other third party running a competition or other event involving one of our books or authors; or
• when we acquire rights from another publisher.

How we use your personal data

We use your personal data lawfully. We do not sell your personal data to third parties. However, we may share your personal data as set out in 'When We Share Your Personal Data'. We will only process your personal data where we have a legal basis to do so. 

The legal basis will depend on the purposes for which we have collected and used your personal data. The details of how we use your personal data and the legal bases for our use are set out in the table below:

Legal basis for processing your personal data:	We may use your personal data to:
Performance of a contract with you: where necessary to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you. (E.g. where you have purchased a Service from us and we need to use your contact details and payment information in order to process your order and provide the Service to you.)	administer your account with us; process your requests or orders, for example, to purchase products or our Services on behalf of an Educational Institution or on your own behalf as the case may be; provide customer service and support to you or your Educational Institution; and if you are an author, illustrator or other licensor to administer your publishing contract, including receipt, review, editing, production, marketing of your content and payment of your royalties or fees.
Legitimate business interests: where necessary to conduct our business and pursue our legitimate interests (such as understanding our customers and operating our business effectively), provided that this is done in a legitimate way which does not unduly affect your privacy and other rights. Where we process your information for our legitimate interests, we make sure that we take into account any potential impact that such use may have on you, particularly where we process children’s personal data. Our legitimate interests do not automatically override yours and we won’t use your information if we believe your interests should override ours, unless we have other grounds to do so (such as your consent or a legal obligation). If you have any concerns about our processing, you have rights and choices which include the right to object (please see Your Rights and Choices).	contact you about submissions you made or content you provided to us; respond to your queries, correspondence and complaints; send you marketing via social channels and post; create our educational analysis tools; communicate service messages to you (e.g. providing information about our products which you have bought or services you have subscribed to); support your teaching and use of any digital platform products;  de-identify personal data; prepare aggregated benchmarks for the purpose of building educational products and performance indicators; carry out aggregated and anonymised research about general engagement with our e-commerce site to help us to provide the right kinds of products and services to our website users; carry out research to produce aggregated and anonymised reporting about educational trends, academic achievement and wellbeing in educational institutions nationwide and internationally, which may be shared openly or sold for profit; assess the quality of our Services; obtain feedback from you in surveys relating to our Services and other educational topics; personalise, enhance, modify or otherwise improve the Services and/or communications that we provide to you; analyse your engagement with our communications; detect and prevent fraud and unauthorised access or illegal activity; improve security and optimisation of our network sites and Services including trouble shooting, updating, testing and software development and support; audit and ensure that the data we are storing about individuals is accurate and up to date; analyse usage and engagement analytics from our e-commerce site and digital platforms to improve the user experience; and  measure or understand the effectiveness of advertising.
Consent: we rely on consent only where we have obtained your active agreement to use your personal data for a specified purpose, for example if you subscribe to a newsletter or to receive certain marketing from us. You can withdraw your consent at any time, including by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of any marketing email we send you.	send you marketing communications (including our newsletters and eUpdates) about our Services, activities, surveys or other matters that we feel may be of interest or use to you (and those of other Hachette UK companies that we believe may interest you); share your information with third parties such as authors, co-publishers or marketing partners so that they can contact you with information that might interest you (as described in When We Share Your Personal Data); and collect data using non-essential cookies and similar technology to help us analyse your use of our websites and our apps.
Compliance with a legal obligation: where we are subject to a legal obligation and need to use your personal information in order to comply with that obligation.	operate a safe and lawful business or comply with another legal obligation; and comply with our policies and procedures or enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees.

Who can see your personal data

Your information may be processed by our staff or by the staff of third parties we work with to deliver our business. Processing of personal data can mean any activity that involves the use of information about someone that can identify them. All uses, for example, obtaining, recording, storing, disclosing, organising, retrieving, deleting and destroying are types of data processing. We take measures to ensure that third parties processing your information on our behalf are acting lawfully in accordance with our instructions and are subject to appropriate confidentiality requirements. We also have appropriate technical and organisational safeguards in place in our company and with third party processors to protect your information. 

Third party processors of your information include: 

• our digital platform hosts and operators, IT support providers, database operators, site analytics providers and software developers; 
• our marketing or publicity service providers;
• our editorial and production service providers, peer-reviewers, third-party manuscript readers; 
• The Education Company Ltd which manages our customer relationship system (Spirit) to ensure up to date and accurate contact details for teachers, schools and customers and purchase records are maintained;
• our royalty system software and royalty statements printing providers; 
• specialist education research partners;
• our financial services and payment service provider;
• our warehousing and delivery service providers;
• our auditors, technical consultants and legal advisors; and
• our fraud detection service providers.

When we share your personal data

We share your information within the companies that make up the Hachette UK group of companies as well as with our parent company and their parent company and as set out below. Where we share your information with third parties it is subject to usual requirements listed in earlier sections of this Privacy Notice.

We will share your information with the following third parties:

• selected authors, speakers, event organisers, marketing or publicity partners and/or market research partners;
• specialist education research partners to help us create our educational analysis tools and products;
• any prospective seller or buyer of businesses or assets, only in the event that we decide to acquire, transfer or sell any business or assets; and
• any other third parties (including legal or other advisors, regulatory authorities, courts and government agencies) where necessary to enable us to enforce our legal rights, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our employees or where such disclosure may be permitted or required by law or where we have a legal obligation to do so.

How we look after your personal data

We look for opportunities to minimise the amount of personal information we hold about you.  Where appropriate we de-identify your information. We use appropriate technological and operational security measures to protect your information against any unauthorised access or unlawful use, such as: 

• ensuring the physical security of our offices, warehouses or other sites;
• ensuring the physical and digital security of our equipment and devices by using appropriate password protection and encryption;
• maintaining data protection policies for, and delivering data protection training to, our employees;
• limiting access to your personal information to those in our company who need to use it in the course of their work and ensure it is kept behind a user password verification system; and
• completing due diligence on our third party processors and any other third parties with which we share personal data, and ensuring that there are appropriate contractual protections in place in our contracts with these third parties.

Protection of Personal Data

You are responsible for ensuring that personal data is transferred to us securely.  We will take all reasonable precautions to ensure that all the personal data that is submitted to us for the purposes above remains secure and have procedures to protect the storage and disclosure of personal data. You must ensure your log-in details and passwords are not shared and are kept securely.
You must keep your password and any other authentication information for our website confidential. If you know or suspect that anyone other than you knows your password or any other authentication information, you must promptly notify us using the contact details in Who We Are.

How long we keep your personal data

We will retain your information for as long as is necessary to provide you with the Services that you have requested from us or for as long as we reasonably need to retain the information for our legitimate interests, such as for the purposes of exercising our legal rights or where we are permitted to do so for academic, literary expression or research purposes. After this period, it will be deleted or in some cases de-identified. 

We operate a data retention policy and data retention procedures, and look to find ways to reduce the amount of information we hold about you and the length of time that we need to keep it. For example:

• we archive our email and paper correspondence regularly and destroy unnecessary information;
• we operate a best practice email retention policy requiring password protected folders and departmental shared drives to provide restricted access to information;
• we conduct regular access reviews to keep access profiles and policies up to date; 
• we delete information collected through marketing channels and stored in shared drives every month provided it is no longer in use;
• we conduct periodic reviews and purge cycles of documents in accordance with our document retention policy;
• we retain information relating to orders, refunds and customer queries for approximately 7 years;
• we retain information relating to commercial contracts for approximately 7 years after expiration or termination, whichever is the sooner;
• we maintain a suppression list of email addresses of individuals who no longer wish to be contacted by us (so that we can comply with their wishes we must store this information permanently);
• we hold test data processed via our digital products with your account for the period of your subscription or as long as you continue to add test data (unless you ask us to delete it earlier).  Thereafter, personal data is held for a further 2 or 3 year period depending on the specific digital product. After that it is de-identified unless you have instructed us to delete it; 
• we securely destroy assessment test trialling papers after recording learners' scores and returning results to schools and we retain de-identified test data in aggregated form for as long as we continue to publish the relevant product; 
• we delete questionnaires for our SNAP and Wellbeing products 2 years after the expiry of your subscription; 
• we delete personal data held on eLibrary at the end of your subscription period or free trial; and 
• we destroy CVs and related information from job applicants who have not been shortlisted for interview once the recruitment process is complete.  The shortlisted candidates’ CVs and related information are kept until after the successful candidate’s probation period, which can be 6 months from their start date. 

International transfers of your information

Our company is located in the UK.

Whenever we transfer your personal information outside of the UK or the European Economic Area (EEA) we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that such personal data is transferred in compliance with applicable data protection laws. If you are located in the UK or the EEA, you may contact us for a copy of the safeguards which we have put in place to protect your personal information in these circumstances.

Automated decision making

Automated decision-making occurs when your information is used by an electronic system to make a decision without human intervention. Generally, we do not make automated decisions about you that have a significant impact on you. However, some of our Services involve the automated marking of tests as described below.

Some of our digital platforms use technology to automatically score tests. This scoring activity is carried out according to a strict marking criteria, set by humans. Depending on the item type, the marking criteria will be a binary correct/incorrect, for instance a multiple-choice question. If a user needs to type a fuller free text answer in response to a test question, then the scoring will still be based on binary criteria, which will be set with a number of rules that indicate an answer is correct (e.g. spelling, key words, punctuation). All rules will be set by a human and based on how a human would score the answer and may be extensive.

Teachers are able to carry out manual checking of test marking and scores by reviewing learners’ answers if they have taken a test interactively. Teachers can edit the marks allocated for a question in the marksheets in Boost Insights. Teachers may review learners’ answers only. Answers cannot be edited by teachers. 

Please contact us at privacy@hoddereducation.co.uk if you would like more information about the automatic test scoring process described above.

Your rights and choices

You have a number of rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. We set out more details about these rights below:

Your right to object

You have the right to object to our using your information for direct marketing and on the basis of our legitimate interests (refer to How We Use Your Personal Data above to see when we are relying on our legitimate interests). If you want to do this you can contact us using the details in Who We Are.

Your right to withdraw consent

The right to withdraw your consent for our use of your information in reliance of your consent (refer to How We Use Your Personal Data to see when we are relying on your consent), which you can do by contacting us using any of the details in Who We Are.

Your other rights and choices

You also have other choices and rights in respect of the information that we hold about you, including: 

• the right to request access to the information that we hold about you to check that we are acting lawfully;
• the right to receive a copy of any information we hold about you in a structured, commonly-used, machine readable format or in another format of your choice;
• the right to request that we transfer your information to another service provider in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format;
• the right to ask us to correct information we hold about you if it is inaccurate or incomplete;
• the right to ask us, in certain circumstances, to delete information we hold about you;
• the right to ask us, in certain circumstances, to restrict processing of your information.

You may exercise your rights and choices by contacting us using the details in Who We Are.

You can also prevent processing for marketing activities by checking certain boxes on forms that we use to collect your data to tell us that you don’t want to be involved in marketing. 

Your right to complain

Please contact us if you have any questions or are unhappy about the way your information is used. We hope we will be able to resolve any problems or issues you may have.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint about us and our use of your information to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (https://ico.org.uk/) or the relevant authority in your country of work or residence.

Changes to this privacy notice

We may make changes to this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will post any changes to our site.

This Privacy Notice was updated in August 2024.