Privacy Policy and Cookies

The Autism Education Trust (AET) is a business hosted by The National Autistic Society (NAS) and is not an official legal entity in its own right.

At the AET and the NAS, we are committed to protecting your privacy. This policy has been written in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. If you have any questions regarding our management of your personal data, or wish to lodge a complaint about how we use your personal data, please contact:

Data Protection Officer
The National Autistic Society
393 City Road
London EC1V 1NG
Please reference the Autism Education Trust in your communication.

Email: dataprotection@nas.org.uk
Phone: 020 7833 2299

You can read the NAS Privacy Policy on their website. 

How do we collect information?

• When you interact with us. We collect personal information from you when you submit a form, register with our website, make a purchase, or otherwise provide us with personal information, whether online, on the phone or in person.
• When you interact with third parties. We may also receive information about you from third parties, for example when you attend AET training through our training hub providers. Where we obtain your details from a third party, we will process the data to the same standards set out in this policy.
• When you visit our website. We may gather information to help us improve your online experience. This includes learning about what pages and topics you are interested in. Like most websites, we use cookies to help us do these activities, but wherever possible, we use aggregated or anonymous information that does not identify individuals. To find out more information about the cookies we use or how to opt-out of tracking, please see our cookies policy, below.

What information do we collect?

Standard personal information includes:

• contact information, such as your name, username, address, email address and phone numbers
• the country you live in, your age, your date of birth and national identifiers (such as your National Insurance number or passport number)
• information about your employment
• details of any contact we have had with you, such as any complaints or incidents
• financial details, such as details about your payments and your bank details
• the results of any credit or any anti-fraud checks we have made on you
• information about how you use our products and services
• information about how you use our website, apps or other technology, including IP addresses or other device information (please see our Cookies policy below for more details).

How do we use this information?

We will use your personal information to provide you with the services, products or information you have requested, or for administration purposes (such as processing a payment of a product).

To enable us to communicate with you effectively, we may sometimes use your data for the purposes of analysis, based on information that you have provided to us. We only ever share your data for these purposes with trusted, contracted suppliers, AET partner training hub providers and the Department for Education (who provide the AET with funding). The data is shared securely and subject to safe disposal agreements. This type of activity is solely designed to help us provide you with the best programmes possible.

We will not use your personal data for any other purpose without your consent and we will contact you according to your stated preferences. We hold your data on a secure database and in usable format only for as long as is required, and determined by the recency of your interactions with us, or for as long as we are required to do so by law.

We only use your personal information for direct marketing purposes if we have your consent. If you no longer want to hear from us, please let us know by emailing info@autismeducationtrust.org.uk.

Your consent

By providing us with your personal data, you consent to the collection and use of any information you provide in accordance with the above purposes and this privacy statement.

We may occasionally need to transfer your information to countries or jurisdictions that do not provide the same level of data protection as the UK. If we do make such a transfer, we will, if appropriate, put a contract in place to ensure your information is protected in line with UK law.

Our email broadcaster is CM Advantage, a UK-registered CRM System. You can read their Privacy Policy on their website here.

Withdrawing consent

You can change or withdraw your consent for us to hold or to use your personal data for the purposes set out above by emailing info@autismeducationtrust.org.uk.

We try to ensure that any changes to your personal data are enacted as soon as the request is processed, which is usually within two working days. Please note, however, that due to the way our communications are prepared this can take up to four weeks to come into effect. We hope this delay won’t cause you any inconvenience.

Please also note that withdrawal of consent will not stop us from sending you administrative communications where necessary (for example, to deliver you information about a purchase or subscription service).

Right of access

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and to have any inaccuracies in your personal details corrected. You can also request that we remove your records from our database or provide you with a copy of the information we hold about you. You can also ask us to stop using your data for a specific purpose.

We will aim to acknowledge receipt of all such requests within three working days and fully respond within four weeks. You can exercise any or all of these rights by emailing info@autismeducationtrust.org.uk.

What are ‘cookies’?

A cookie is a small text file deposited on your computer’s hard drive, that allows your choices and information to be remembered between one page and the next. In general, the function of a cookie is to recognise you as you request successive pages; this then makes it possible for the site to access information about you that it has already stored in its own databases, from your previous page requests and forms. Cookies themselves often contain little more than a long string of letters and numbers that identify your visit to our sites, so that the site can look up this information. Your browser may give you tools to allow you to view the contents of the cookies that have been set by the sites that you have visited.

Each website can only access those cookies that it has created. We do not have access to the cookies from websites belonging to other organisations, and in turn other websites do not have access to cookies used by our websites.

We only use basic cookies often called “essential” cookies on the AET site. We collect two cookies:

1. For google analytics
2. For e-commerce, so that your information is recalled when you log in.

More information

The Information Commissioner also has a page of information about cookies, including links to instructions on how you can use settings in your browser to control them, or to remove them yourself.