Privacy Policy
The Joyful Music Tutor
1. Introduction
This privacy notice explains how The Joyful Music Tutor collects, uses and protects your personal data when you use our website, contact us, enquire about lessons, book music tuition, make payments, attend lessons, or communicate with us.
By providing us with your data, you confirm that you are over 18 years of age. If you are enquiring on behalf of a student under the age of 18, you confirm that you are the parent, guardian, or authorised adult responsible for that student.
The Joyful Music Tutor is the data controller and is responsible for your personal data. In this privacy notice, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to The Joyful Music Tutor.
If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how your personal data is handled, please contact us using the details below.
Contact Details
Full name of business: The Joyful Music Tutor
Data Protection Contact: Joo-Lee Lewis
Email address: hello@joyfulmusictutor.com
Postal address: 10 Brancepeth Close, Durham DH1 5XL
It is important that the information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please let us know if your personal information changes by emailing us.
2. What Data We Collect About You, Why We Collect It, and Our Lawful Basis
Personal data means any information that can identify an individual. It does not include anonymised data.
We may collect and process the following types of personal data.
Communication Data
This includes any communication you send to us by email, website contact form, text message, WhatsApp, phone, social media message, social media comment, or any other form of communication.
We use this data to respond to enquiries, communicate with students and parents, keep appropriate records, manage lesson arrangements, and deal with any questions, concerns or complaints.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is our legitimate interests, which are to respond to communications, keep suitable records, and manage our music teaching practice properly.
Customer and Student Data
This may include your name, student name, parent or guardian name, email address, phone number, billing details, lesson booking information, payment details, lesson history, attendance information, and details relating to the services you have purchased or enquired about.
We use this data to provide music lessons, manage bookings, process payments, communicate about lessons, keep teaching records, and maintain suitable business and accounting records.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is the performance of a contract between you and us, or taking steps at your request before entering into a contract.
Lesson and Progress Data
As part of providing music tuition, we may keep simple notes about lesson content, practice tasks, repertoire, technical work, exam preparation, performance goals, learning preferences, and student progress.
We use this information to plan lessons, support the student’s musical development, provide continuity between lessons, and offer appropriate guidance.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is our legitimate interests in providing high-quality, individualised music tuition, and where relevant, the performance of our contract with you.
Payment and Transaction Data
This may include payment records, invoices, transaction details, and information required for accounting purposes. We do not store full card details ourselves. Where card payments are taken, these are handled by secure third-party payment providers.
We use this data to process payments, manage accounts, keep financial records, and comply with legal and tax obligations.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is the performance of a contract and compliance with legal obligations.
Website User Data
This includes information about how you use our website and any online services, including pages visited, forms submitted, links clicked, and any information you choose to post or submit through our website.
We use this data to operate our website, provide relevant content, maintain website security, back up our systems, and manage our business.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is our legitimate interests in running our website and music teaching practice effectively.
Technical Data
This may include your IP address, browser type, device information, time zone, page views, length of visit, navigation paths, and other information about the technology you use to access our website.
This data may be collected through analytics tools, cookies and similar technologies.
We use this data to understand how people use our website, improve our website, protect our systems, and make our content more relevant and useful.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is our legitimate interests in administering our website, protecting our business, improving our services, and understanding the effectiveness of our marketing.
Marketing Data
This includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us, your communication preferences, and your interaction with our newsletters, offers, blog posts, events or promotions.
We may use this data to send you information about music lessons, consultation lessons, workshops, resources, blogs, events, offers, or other services that may be relevant to you.
Our lawful basis for processing this data is either your consent or our legitimate interests in developing and growing our teaching practice.
You can unsubscribe from marketing communications at any time.
3. Sensitive Data
We do not routinely collect sensitive personal data.
Sensitive data includes information about race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, health information, genetic data, biometric data, criminal convictions and offences.
However, in some circumstances, students or parents may choose to share information that helps us support learning, such as information about confidence, nerves, anxiety, physical comfort, disability, health, or learning needs. Where this information is shared with us, we will treat it carefully, respectfully and confidentially, and only use it to support the student’s learning experience.
We will only collect this type of information where it is relevant and helpful to the teaching relationship, and where you have chosen to share it with us.
4. How We Collect Your Personal Data
We may collect personal data directly from you when you:
contact us by email, phone, text, WhatsApp, social media or website form; book a lesson, consultation or course; make a payment; subscribe to a mailing list; attend a lesson; complete a form; or communicate with us about your music learning.
We may also collect some data automatically when you use our website, through cookies and similar technologies. Please see our Cookie Policy for more information.
We may receive data from third parties such as website analytics providers, email marketing providers, booking systems, payment processors, social media platforms, or other technical service providers.
5. Marketing Communications
We may send you marketing communications if you have requested information from us, purchased services from us, subscribed to our mailing list, or otherwise agreed to receive updates from us.
Marketing communications may include information about lessons, availability, workshops, consultation lessons, blog posts, resources, events, offers, or updates from The Joyful Music Tutor.
You can ask us to stop sending marketing messages at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any marketing email, or by contacting us directly.
We will not share your personal data with any third party for their own marketing purposes without your express consent.
If you opt out of marketing communications, this does not apply to personal data provided as a result of lesson bookings, purchases, payments, or other necessary business transactions.
6. Disclosure of Your Personal Data
We may need to share your personal data with trusted third parties where necessary for the running of our business. These may include:
service providers who provide IT, website, email, booking, payment or system administration services; professional advisers including accountants, lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers; government bodies such as HMRC where we are legally required to report information; exam boards or accompanists where this is necessary and agreed as part of your musical study; and third parties connected with a sale, transfer or restructuring of our business.
We require all third parties who process your data to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. They are only allowed to process your personal data for specific purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
7. International Transfers
Some of the third-party services we use may process personal data outside the UK.
Where your personal data is transferred outside the UK, we will ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your data. This may include using providers in countries approved as providing an adequate level of protection, using approved contractual terms, or relying on other legally recognised safeguards.
Where no appropriate safeguard is available, we may request your explicit consent to the transfer. You have the right to withdraw this consent at any time.
8. Data Security
We have put appropriate security measures in place to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used, altered, disclosed, or accessed without authorisation.
Access to your personal data is limited to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Anyone who processes your personal data on our behalf must do so confidentially and in accordance with our instructions.
We have procedures in place to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any relevant regulator if legally required.
9. Data Retention
We will only keep your personal data for as long as necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, including legal, accounting and reporting requirements.
For tax purposes, we are required to keep basic information about customers, including contact details, financial records and transaction data, for six years after they stop being customers.
Lesson notes and progress records will only be kept for as long as they are useful for the teaching relationship, business records, or legitimate professional purposes.
In some circumstances, we may anonymise personal data for research, planning or statistical purposes. Once anonymised, this information no longer identifies you and may be used indefinitely.
10. Your Legal Rights
Under data protection laws, you have rights in relation to your personal data. These include the right to:
request access to your personal data; request correction of your personal data; request erasure of your personal data; object to processing; request restriction of processing; request transfer of your personal data; and withdraw consent where consent is the lawful basis for processing.
You can read more about your rights on the Information Commissioner’s Office website:
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/
If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us by email.
You will not usually have to pay a fee to access your personal data or exercise your rights. However, we may charge a reasonable fee or refuse to comply if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive.
We may need to request specific information from you to confirm your identity before responding to a request. This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to someone who has no right to receive it.
We aim to respond to legitimate requests within one month. If your request is complex or you have made several requests, it may take longer. In that case, we will let you know.
If you are unhappy with how we collect or use your data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues:
We would be grateful if you contacted us first so that we can try to resolve your concern.
11. Third-Party Links
Our website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins, videos, payment systems, booking platforms, social media pages or applications.
Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you.
We do not control third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy notices. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of any website you visit.
12. Cookies
Our website may use cookies and similar technologies to improve your experience, understand how our website is used, and support website functionality.
You can set your browser to refuse all or some cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable cookies, some parts of the website may not work properly.
For more information, please see our Cookie Policy.
13. Complaints
If you have a concern or complaint about how we handle your personal data, please contact us so that we can look into it properly and respond fairly.
For further information, please read our complaints procedure.