1. Introduction
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:
- enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task.
- recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested.
- measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast.
- analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with our services so we can make them better.
2. ‘First-party’ cookies
These are cookies set by the drb Schools and Academies Services website. They are used to remember the selections or preferences that you have made when looking at the information on this site.
viewed_cookie_policy
- Purpose: When you first arrive at this site you see a banner at the top of the page alerting you to our use of cookies. This cookie remembers when you have clicked the link saying “Accept”.
- Benefit: To remember the selections or preferences you’ve already made when looking at information or using a service.
- Data stored by cookie: An instruction to hide the banner (Yes or No).
- Duration of cookie: Expires after 12 months.
3. Third-party cookies
We use a number of suppliers who may also set cookies on their websites’ on its behalf.
Cookies for measuring website usage
drb Schools and Academies Services use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting its users’ needs and to understand how we could do it better.
Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data. Further information is available at Cookies & Google Analytics.
Google Analytics cookies: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmz
- Purpose: To record how many people are using the website and how they move around the site once they’ve arrived:
- _utma tracks how many times (if any) you have visited the website before.
- _utmb and _utmc are connected, and track how long you stay on the site.
- _utmz tracks identifies where you’ve come from e.g. from a search engine or from another website.
- Benefit: So service is available when you want it and fast, we measure numbers and volumes of visitors.
- Data stored by cookies: No personal information about you, just information about your computer and your browser.
- Duration of cookies:
- _utma: Expires 2 years after your last visit to this site.
- _utmb: Expires 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- _utmc: Expires when you close your browser.
- _utmz: Expires 6 months after it was last set.
- Relevant sites:
Cookies set by other websites through this site
We want to provide interesting and engaging content on our website. On a number of pages we use ‘plug ins’ or embedded media, e.g. we embed YouTube videos in some pages.
The suppliers of these services may also set cookies on your device when you visit the pages where we have used this type of content. These are known as ‘third-party’ cookies.
YouTube cookie: VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
- Purpose: To track visitor views of YouTubevideos embedded in web pages.
- Benefit: When we provide links to third party services you find useful, they may place a cookie on your device to make their service easier to use. YouTube is owned by Google: Google’s privacy policy.
- Data stored by cookie: Unique identifier, no personal information (data is only used in aggregate).
Duration of cookie: Expires after 241 days.
4. How to control and delete cookies
We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.
However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.
Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your machine as well as more general information about cookies.
Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of our website.
If you wish to view your cookie code, just click on a cookie to open it. You’ll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.
For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.
To opt-out of third-parties collecting any data regarding your interaction on our website, please refer to their websites for further information
Updated HS – April 2018
