Your privacy matters

Last updated 13 September 2026.

Who we are

The Townley Parents & Friends Association ("the PFA", "we", "us") is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, registered charity number 1212663. We are the data controller for the personal information described below. You can contact us at contact@townleypta.co.uk.

Membership

Anyone can become a member of the PFA. When you join using our membership form we collect:

• Your name and email address, which you confirm with a code we email to you.
• Your mobile number, if you give it.
• Whether you are the parent or carer of a child at Townley Grammar School and, if you are, your child's name, year group and house.
• Whether you would like to join the parents' WhatsApp community, and anything you tell us you would like to help with.
• Your permission for us to email you, and the internet (IP) address your application was sent from, which helps us deal with misuse of the form.

We use this to keep our register of members, which our constitution requires us to keep, to send you notice of members' meetings, and to keep you informed about the PFA. We ask for your child's year group so we know when your child has left the school, rather than asking you every year.

We keep a record of changes to your membership — for example when it was confirmed, by whom, and if it ends, why — so we can show who was a member at a given time and answer any questions about how your details have been handled.

The parents' WhatsApp community

Our WhatsApp community is only for parents and carers of current Townley students, because the messages in it can include details of students' school day and activities. If you ask to join it:

• With your permission, which you give by ticking a box on the membership form, we share the details you gave on the form with Townley Grammar School, so the school can confirm that you are the parent or carer of a current student. We share them for that purpose only, and nothing else. We keep a record of when you gave your permission and the words you agreed to.
• If you do not give that permission, you can still be a member of the PFA, but we cannot add you to the WhatsApp community, because the school's check is how we confirm that everyone in it is a current parent or carer.
• We use your mobile number to match you to the community, because WhatsApp identifies people by their phone number.
• From time to time a PFA administrator checks who is in the community — the phone numbers and the names shown in WhatsApp — against our register, so that only confirmed parents and carers remain in it. This check is the reason the community can be kept safe for students.

WhatsApp is run by WhatsApp LLC (Meta), and what it does with information inside WhatsApp is covered by its own privacy policy.

Grant requests from school staff

When a member of Townley Grammar School staff asks us for funding using our grant request form, we collect their name, school email address (confirmed with a code), department, the request itself, any quotes they give, and the commitments they make. We use this to consider the request, to contact them about it, and to keep a record of how the charity's money is spent.

If a grant is awarded, we publish the title, department, amount and a description of the request on our grants page, so families can see what their support has paid for. We do not publish the requester's name or email address, and we remove greetings and sign-offs from the published description.

Donations, events and other contact

• Contact details you give us when you email us, volunteer, or enquire about sponsorship.
• Donation information — the amount and date of a donation, and, if you choose to Gift Aid it, the declaration and the details HMRC requires us to keep.
• Event and booking information — for example when you book an 11+ familiarisation place or buy second-hand uniform.

We use these to process and acknowledge donations and claim Gift Aid where you have asked us to, to organise events, bookings and the second-hand uniform shop, and to thank our supporters and sponsors.

Our lawful bases

• Legal obligation — keeping our register of members, and Gift Aid records for HMRC.
• Legitimate interests — running the charity, considering grant requests and publishing awarded grants, and keeping the WhatsApp community limited to current parents and carers so it stays safe for students.
• Consent — emailing you about the PFA's activities, and sharing your details with Townley Grammar School so it can confirm you are a current parent or carer before you join the WhatsApp community. For the school check we rely on your consent and on our legitimate interest in keeping the community safe for students: we only ever carry out that check for people who have given their permission. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
• Contract — processing bookings and purchases you make.

Who we share it with

We don't sell your data, ever. We share only what's necessary with:

• Townley Grammar School, only if you have given your permission on the membership form, so the school can confirm you are the parent or carer of a current student before you join the WhatsApp community.
• PFA volunteers and school staff given access by the PFA, who manage the membership register and grant requests. They must sign in, and each person's access is recorded.
• Payment providers (such as PayPal and Stripe) to process card payments securely — they handle your card details, not us.
• HMRC, to claim Gift Aid where you've made a declaration.
• Service providers who host and run our systems on our behalf, under appropriate agreements: Cloudflare (this website, our membership and grant request records, and the anti-spam check on our forms), Microsoft (our email, which sends confirmation codes and messages, and the board our grants team uses to manage requests), and Brainzie Ltd, which provides the secure sign-in used by the people who manage the register.

Our website loads fonts from Google Fonts, and our forms use Cloudflare's anti-spam check; these providers may process limited technical data (such as your IP address) to deliver the page and tell people from automated abuse.

Cookies and your browser

This website does not set advertising or tracking cookies. Links that say "email us" simply open your own email app. We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and collects no personal data: we see only anonymous, aggregate numbers such as page views, the site that referred a visit and the country it came from.

The anti-spam check on our forms may use technical information from your browser to work. The admin pages, used only by people the PFA has given access to, keep their sign-in in your browser's session storage, which is cleared when the browser tab is closed.

How long we keep it

• Email confirmation codes expire after 15 minutes, and are stored only in a form that cannot be read back.
• Membership records are kept while you are a member. When a membership ends we mark it as ended rather than deleting it straight away, so we can show who was a member at a given time; you can ask us to erase it.
• Grant requests are kept as part of the charity's record of how its money has been spent.
• Gift Aid records are kept for the period HMRC requires (currently at least six years).
• Other information is kept only while it is relevant, and then securely deleted.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to withdraw consent. You can withdraw your permission to share your details with the school at any time by emailing membership@townleypta.co.uk. We will stop sharing them and record the withdrawal; because the school's check is how places are confirmed, this also means leaving the WhatsApp community. Withdrawing does not affect anything shared before you withdrew, and you remain a member of the PFA. To exercise any of these rights, email contact@townleypta.co.uk. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Changes

We update this policy when what we collect, or who we share it with, changes. The current version always lives on this page, with the date it was last updated at the top.

Last updated: June 2026.