Cookies and how they Benefit You

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.


Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.


Types of Cookie

First Party Cookies

First party cookies are set by the website you are visiting and they can only be read by that site.

Third Party Cookies

Third party cookies are set by other organisations that we use for different services. For example, Guildford College Group uses external analytics services and these suppliers may set cookies on Guildford College Group’s behalf in order to report what’s popular and what’s not. The website you are visiting may also contain content embedded from, for example, YouTube or Flickr and these sites may set their own cookies.

Session Cookies

Session Cookies are stored only for the duration of your visit to a website and these are deleted from your device when your browsing session ends.

Persistent Cookies

This type of cookie is saved on your device for a fixed period. Persistent cookies are used where we need to know who you are for more than one usage session. For example, if you have asked us to remember preferences like your location or your username.

Flash cookies

Many websites use Adobe Flash Player to deliver video and game content to their users. Adobe utilise their own cookies, which are not manageable through your browser settings but are used by the Flash Player for similar purposes, such as storing preferences or tracking users.Flash Cookies work in a different way to web browser cookies; rather than having individual cookies for particular jobs, a website is restricted to storing all data in one cookie. You can control how much data, if any, may be stored in that cookie but you cannot choose what type of information is allowed to be stored. You can manage which websites can store information in Flash cookies on your device via the website storage settings panel on the Adobe website.


More about our Cookies

Website Function Cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Remembering your search settings
  • Allowing you to add comments to our site
  • Remembering your preferences such as colours, text size and layout

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called ‘analytics’ programs also tell us if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our’s and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.


Cookies used by the College

Google Analytics Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. It sets a cookie in order to evaluate use of those services and compile a report for us. Opt-out of Google Analytics cookies.
Google AdSense AdSense uses cookies to improve advertising. Some common applications are to target advertising based on what’s relevant to a user, to improve reporting on campaign performance, and to avoid showing ads the user has already seen. Cookies themselves contain no personally identifiable information. Depending on the publisher’s and the user’s settings, information associated with cookies used in advertising may be added to the user’s Google Account. If a user opts out of ads personalization using Google’s Ads Settings, they will no longer receive personalized advertising from Google.
Google Maps We use Google Maps to provide location maps for our colleges. These cookies are used by Google to store user preferences and information when viewing pages with Google maps on them. Google Privacy Policy
Twitter We use the official Twitter widget to display our lastest ‘tweets’ from our feeds. No personal information is stored in these cookies. Twitter Privacy Policy