Privacy Notice

When you interact with Dreamline International, you trust us to handle your personal information with care. We will always be clear about the ways in which we intend to use your personal information, and the choices and rights you have in relation to it.

This Privacy Notice explains how we collect, use and store your personal information in relation to your use of this website and the services we offer, what your legal rights are, and how you can exercise them. Please take the time to read it; if you have any questions about anything it contains, please get in touch. The signed original of this notice can be downloaded from our Policies page.

We are Dreamline International (“we”, “our”, “us”), a limited company providing guardianship services: local care and support for international students studying in the UK without their families. Our role includes ensuring their safety, well-being and academic progress through 24/7 emergency assistance, emotional support and regular check-ins, and acting as a bridge between schools, students and parents.

We are registered in England and Wales under company number 15745195, and our registered office is at 52 Dalmuir Road, Birmingham, B31 2GY. For the purposes of this notice, Dreamline International is the data controller, and we are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under registration number ZB879136.

We collect personal information about you whenever you engage with us, apply for a job with us, or use one of our services. This includes:

• When you use our website
• When you contact us by email, telephone or post
• When you interact with us on social media
• When you make a complaint
• When you contact us to exercise one of your legal rights
• When you apply for a job with us or attend an interview
• When you register for an event or training course, or subscribe to our newsletter
• When you apply to use our services

The types of personal information we collect depend on the nature of your interactions with us, and may include:

• Your name, address and contact details, including email address and telephone number
• Date of birth
• Financial information, such as payment-related information or bank account details
• Technical information, including your device type, IP address, browser and operating system
• Information about your visit to our website, including the pages you visit and how you use it
• Details relating to any job application, such as your covering letter, CV, and education and employment history

We must have a lawful, valid reason for using your personal information. The main lawful bases we rely on are contract performance, legal obligation, legitimate interests, and consent (which you may withdraw at any time). We may use your personal information to:

• Deal with your enquiries, requests or complaints
• Send you details of forthcoming events and training courses which you have requested, and we feel would be of interest to you
• Send you communications you have asked to receive from us
• Process your application for guardianship if you are a parent
• Carry out our obligations under contracts between you and us, and meet our legal obligations to regulators, government and law enforcement bodies
• Assess your suitability for a job you have applied for
• Better understand how visitors use our website, so we can improve it

If you apply for a job with us, we collect only the personal information necessary to assess your suitability, progress your application and comply with our legal obligations — including your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history, your right to work in the UK, and information gathered at interview. Any equal opportunities questionnaire is entirely voluntary, and the information is used only to produce anonymised monitoring statistics.

Pre-employment checks — references, background checks and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks — are only sought once an offer of employment has been made, and we will always tell you before we do this. If your application is unsuccessful, we retain your information for 6 months (or, with your agreement, 12 months in our talent pool); if it is successful, your information is transferred to your employee file and retained for the duration of your employment plus 6 years.

We only share personal information with other organisations where it is lawful to do so, share only what is necessary, and always share it securely with the right recipient. We may share your personal information:

• To comply with a legal or regulatory obligation — for example, providing information about employee income tax contributions to HMRC
• In an emergency — for example, where we need to protect a person from serious harm
• Where we have safeguarding concerns about a child, and we need to alert the local authority
• To comply with the instructions of a law enforcement authority
• To protect our business interests

We have robust technical and operational security measures in place to protect your personal information against unauthorised access or unlawful use. Access is limited to those employees, contractors and third parties with a legitimate business need to know, who process it only on our strict instructions and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have a robust procedure in place to deal with any suspected personal data breaches, and will notify you and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within the specified timescales where we are legally required to do so. Enquiries submitted through this website are transmitted securely and delivered to our team mailbox by our service providers, Cloudflare (hosting and spam protection) and Resend (email delivery), each acting as a data processor.

We only keep personal information for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purpose it was collected for. We review our retention periods on a regular basis, and delete or securely destroy information when we no longer need it. In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information (so that it can no longer be attributed to you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use it indefinitely without further notice to you.

To fulfil our guardianship role, we retain students’ information, which may include:

• Name, address, date of birth and details of ethnicity
• Contact details, school details and copies of school reports
• Medical information
• Copies of passports, BRPs and police checks
• Details of bank accounts, finances and mobile phone accounts
• Information on food preferences, interests and hobbies
• Records of meetings held with students and schools

We will keep you up to date with our latest news and details of services, upcoming events and training courses only if you have told us that you are happy to receive marketing communications from us. You can opt out at any time by contacting us using the details in this notice, or by clicking the unsubscribe link in any marketing email you receive from us.

This website includes links to websites and applications operated by third parties, including accredited guardianship organisations and member schools. We have no control over these third-party websites and cannot take responsibility for any information you might give to them. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.

A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers downloaded to your device when you access a website. We use “session cookies” (which expire at the end of your browser session and help us understand how our website is being used) and “persistent cookies” (which are stored between sessions and help us recognise you as a returning visitor). Our spam-protection service (Cloudflare Turnstile) may also set strictly necessary cookies to verify that you are a genuine visitor.

You can use your web browser to accept, decline or delete cookies. Most browsers accept cookies automatically; declining them may prevent you from taking full advantage of our website.

We want to ensure that you are always in control of your personal information. Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Have inaccurate or incomplete information rectified
• Have your information erased (the “right to be forgotten”) — not an absolute right; each request is reviewed case by case
• Restrict or suppress the processing of your information in certain circumstances
• Object to your information being used — including an absolute right to stop its use for direct marketing
• Data portability — receive information you have provided to us and which is held electronically, or have it transferred to another organisation
• Complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent information-rights body, if you believe we have not handled your information in accordance with data protection law

This notice is kept under regular review — at least annually, or sooner if data protection legislation changes — and the most current version will always be available on this website. It was last reviewed on 25 May 2025.