Privacy policy

This privacy policy applies to all personal information collected on www.InspiringtheFuture.govt.nz, including information collected from role models who sign up to participate in Inspiring the Future. The policy lets you know how we, the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), will collect, protect, manage and use your personal information.

When we may collect personal information

We may collect your personal information when you:

  • sign up to be a role model in the Inspiring the Future programme
  • complete forms on this website such as e-newsletter sign-ups, surveys, search forms, competition entry forms and registration forms
  • contact us with questions, comments or other communications.

When you contact us, we may create a profile of you in our customer relationship management system (CRM). This will hold:

  • information we collect from you
  • information you provide, including your contact details
  • details of our communications with you.

The personal information we may collect

If you sign up as a role model

If you sign up to be a role model in the Inspiring the Future programme, we will collect, and you will need to provide, the following personal information:

  • name
  • email address
  • phone number
  • pronouns
  • gender
  • age
  • ethnicity
  • region and district
  • job role (occupation)
  • industry you work in
  • languages you speak.

We will also ask you to complete a Criminal Record Check form (provided by the Ministry of Justice) and to enable us to review the results of that check. We will use the information we receive through the criminal convictions check to decide whether you can participate in the Inspiring the Future programme.

We may also collect this personal information (if you choose to provide it when you sign up):

  • the name of the organisation/school you represent
  • your work experience and career pathway
  • intellectual or physical disabilities, or neurodivergences
  • iwi affiliations
  • photo of you
  • education background.

If you complete forms or contact us

If you complete forms on our website, or contact us at any other time, such as to receive communications from us, we will collect the personal information that you provide. This could include your:

  • name
  • email address
  • phone number
  • any other personal information you provide.

If you contact us using our contact form, we may also collect information about:

  • your job role (occupation)
  • the name of the organisation/school you represent
  • region
  • your specific interest in Inspiring the Future and how you heard about us.

How we may use your personal information

If you sign up as a role model

If you sign up as a role model, your personal information will be held on our database. Most of the personal information that you include in your profile (other than your contact details) will be made available to schools, and to people who work at approved careers education organisations and/or trusted Inspiring the Future Aotearoa partners, that are running Inspiring the Future events. Once you have accepted an invitation to an Inspiring the Future event, the event organisers will be provided with your contact information.

We will hold the results of your criminal convictions check on our database. However, that information will only be used for our internal purposes and will not be shared with schools or any other third party.

Your personal information may also be used by us anonymously for research or analytical purposes.

We may access your profile and use your personal information to help you or someone else who contacts us about your profile. Your personal information may also be used in our customer relationship management and support systems if you contact us about your profile.

We may review your profile at any time and may contact you if we have any questions or concerns about any aspect of your profile. We may also review your profile if you or someone else contacts us about your profile. As set out in the programme terms, we may edit or take down your profile at any time.

If you complete forms or contact us

If you contact us we will use your personal information to best respond to any queries, comments or requests you may have.

How we look after your personal information

We take all reasonable precautions to protect your personal information we hold from misuse, loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. We:

  • have strong external and internal premises security
  • store information in access-controlled systems 
  • audit our use of personal information
  • provide training on the Privacy Act to all our staff.

We may use cloud computing to manage and store information. We operate our cloud computing according to New Zealand Government standards.

We use third party providers to store and process our data.

We store most of the personal information we collect and generate electronically on a database that is hosted on Amazon Web Services cloud servers located in Australia. This means that the personal information we hold may be transferred to, or accessed from, countries other than New Zealand.

We retain personal information in compliance with the requirements of the Public Records Act 2005.

If you have signed up as a role model, and no longer want to be involved in Inspiring the Future, you can delete your profile by contacting inspiringthefuture@tec.govt.nz, or through the Inspiring the Future platform. If you choose to delete your profile, we will retain the complete information on your profile for 28 days. Once your profile is deleted, we will retain some anonymised information about you for reporting and analytics purposes. If you have contacted us with an issue about your profile, your personal information will continue to be held on our customer relationship management and support systems unless you request that it be deleted. 

How we share your personal information

If you sign up as a role model, some of the personal information that you include in your profile will be made available to schools, and to people who work at approved careers education organisations and/or trusted Inspiring the Future Aotearoa partners, that are running Inspiring the Future events. Once you have accepted an invitation to an Inspiring the Future event, the event organiser will be provided with your contact information.

We may also disclose your information to others including:

  • our agents or contractors that perform a particular function or service on our behalf
  • other government agencies, bodies and regulators
  • our professional advisors (eg, accountants or lawyers).

We may also disclose your information to third parties where we are required to or authorised by law.

Other than as described above, we will not sell, pass on or share any information you provide to us to any third parties.

How to access your personal information

If you have signed up to be a role model, you can access and edit your personal information at any time by editing your profile.

For any other personal information we hold about you, you have the right to:

  • request access to any personal information we hold about you
  • ask for your information to be corrected if you think it is wrong.

If you would like to request your information or seek corrections, please email us at privacy@tec.govt.nz.

Privacy on our website

We collect information about all visits to our website, including your:

  • IP address
  • browser, eg, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox
  • device, eg, PC, laptop, phone, tablet.

Our systems remove any information that might identify you and send the rest to Google Analytics. We then use Google Analytics to find out information such as:

  • how many people visit our website
  • what pages of the website were visited most and least
  • where people connect from
  • what types of devices they use.

Find out more about Google Analytics.

The TEC uses cookies to collect data about each visit to this website. We use that data to generate statistics about how the website is used (eg, what pages are accessed). This assists us to understand what is important to users and further improve website performance and/or usefulness to users.

A cookie is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by a web browser. It is sent by a web server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server and is used for remembering data about the computer user (such as IP address, dates and times of visits, pages accessed and links clicked).

Your website may have an option allowing you to disable cookies. If you decide to use that option, note that it could make some aspects of this website unusable.

Inspiring the Future website is hosted and operated by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC).

Contact us with questions or concerns

If you have any questions about privacy at the TEC or how we manage your personal information, you can contact us.

Email: privacy@tec.govt.nz

Post: The Privacy Officer
Tertiary Education Commission
PO Box 27048
Wellington 6141

Phone: 0800 601 301

If you are not satisfied with our response to any privacy-related concern you may have, you can contact the Privacy Commissioner.

Email: enquiries@privacy.org.nz

Post: Office of the Privacy Commissioner
PO Box 10094
Wellington 6143

Phone: 0800 803 909 (NZ only) or +64 4 474 7590