Disclosing with personal details
If you have disclosed an incident with your personal details, then a member of the Student Support Team or HR Team will receive your report. They will contact you via email to invite you to meet with them in person or online.
When you meet with an adviser,, they will:
● Talk to you in more detail about the incident that you’re disclosing in complete confidence
● Explain the available support both internally at the RCA and externally. You can decide whether you wish to access this. If so, they can help you to access the support. This could include support relating to your physical health, mental health, sexual health (for example access to STI checks and contraceptive advice)
● Provide information about your reporting options if you wish for action to be taken in relation to the incident you are reporting. This can include:
○ students and staff can report student misconduct under the Student Misconduct and Disciplinary Policy and Procedure, to be investigated
○ students can make a formal complaint about the behaviour of a staff member under The Student Complaints Policy and Procedure, to be investigated
○ staff can report another staff member to HR for the incident to be investigated
○ reporting to the Police (we will not normally report to the Police without your consent. The exception to this would be where the reported incident causes serious concern about the safety of students, staff, or the public)
By submitting a report on this platform, you are not committing to taking any particular action. You will simply be offered an appointment to discuss your options, so that you have as much information as possible to make an informed choice about what (if anything) you do next. If you decide that you only want to access support from the College or specialist support providers, and do not want to make a formal report, then you will not be pressured to do so. There may however be situations where we need to take action despite your wishes if we believe there is a risk to you or to another person or people. Reasonable action may be taken internally to manage the risk but this will always be discussed with you beforehand. ,
Disclosing Anonymously
You can submit a report on this platform without providing any contact details. If this is because you are concerned about providing your details, please be assured that personal information is held in the strictest confidence and not shared with anyone without your prior permission. Sharing your contact details means that we can offer you appropriate support, and advise you of your options (for example if you want the issue to be investigated by the RCA).
If you still prefer to report anonymously, please be aware that we cannot normally take forward any issues you report. This is because we cannot verify the information with you or request any further information or clarification, and because passing on the information may risk revealing your identity.
However, the information you provide can still be helpful. Anonymous data helps us to understand what incidents are occurring, so that we can enhance support for students, and work to prevent incidents across the College.
If you choose to disclose anonymously then we will not be able to contact you directly in order to offer support unless you opt in to our anonymous two-messaging feature. If you would like to further contact so that you can be given information about available support or advice on your options, please choose to report with your contact details or opt-in to our anonymous two-messaging feature (more information below).
If at any point you decide that you would like to provide a named report and access further support, you can contact the Student Support Team on student-support@rca.ac.uk who will be more than happy to help.
Anonymous Two-Way Messaging
Report + Support now offers reporters the option to opt into two-way messaging when reporting anonymously.
Two-way messaging allows you to continue to discuss your report with an advisor after you’ve submitted it. During the process of filling in the reporting questions, you’ll be given the option to opt in. This will generate a 16-character code which you must keep a record of to access the report and messaging service in the future. There is no way to recover this code, if you do not save you will not be able to use this service.
We won’t collect any information that may identify you, it’s completely anonymous and entirely up to you if you wish to provide any information that would identify you. Remember that the details of an incident that you share may also identify you as well as any obvious personal information such as your name or email address.
Your data is important to us. We won't collect or store any information that goes against our privacy policy.
What happens to the data gathered from reports?
The data collected from Report + Support is used to produce anonymised annual reports. These reports would include the number of cases, most reported types of harassment and location.
How secure is the data and information sent through the system?
Data held on Report + Support is GDPR compliant and further information about how data is collected and stored is outlined in the Privacy Notice. The system has been security tested by both the developer, Culture Shift, and by the RCA.
How long is data sorted on the system?
We will only retain personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for. We will keep records of reports one year from case closure on the Report + Support system as outlined in the Privacy Notice. All personal data will be kept according to the Records Retention Schedule.
