What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small text file that a website may store on your device (computer, smartphone, tablet – the thing you use to browse the internet) used for storing a variety of information – usually to identify your session in some way. This doesn’t necessarily mean it contains personal information to identify you – just, for example, that the site knows that you’re returning to it, rather than being a new visitor. Some sites – such as online shopping sites – may use a Cookie to log you in, or greet you with tailored special offers.

Cookies may be set directly by the website you are visiting (“First party cookies”), or by a different website whose service the website you are visiting uses (“Third party cookies”). Third party cookies are significant in that they can track you between websites – i.e. an advertising provider may tailor advertising because you looked for a particular product on two different websites.

Some cookies are temporary and are deleted from your device when you close your browser (“Session cookies”), others may be stored for longer (“Persistent cookies”) – the purpose the cookies are stored for will determine which of these are used – if the website wants to log you in automatically the next time you visit using a session cookie will be no use!

Controlling use of cookies on your device

Your web browser will contain settings that allow you to control cookies across any website you visit – such as blocking or deleting cookies. You may however find that this impacts functionality of websites you are attempting to visit.

The website AboutCookies.org gives instructions on how to manage cookies in most web browsers.

AboutCookies.org: How to control cookies

AboutCookies.org: How to delete cookies

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies to 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

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

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

• Remembering your view settings (such as which year group’s letters you are interested in)
• Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions

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

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to track visits to our website in order to make improvements – such as removing pages that aren’t viewed or renaming pages people can’t find. Google Analytics sets First Party cookies to identify visitors, but doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information. We will not link or seek to link the IP address of a computer with the identity of a user.

Google provide a browser-based tool that you can install and use to opt out of all GA data collection. You can install it from their Google Analytics opt-out page.

Google Maps

Our contact us page uses mapping provided by Google Maps, Google set cookies to enable this to function as expected.

ShareThis

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site. These are provided by ShareThis, whose privacy policy can be found here

The privacy implications upon liking or sharing our pages this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

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 should disable them in your browser as described at the start of this page.