Privacy Policy

The most common types of personal information we collect include:

• Names — students, parents, and guardians
• Email addresses and other contact details
• Information submitted via forms on our website
• Survey responses and feedback
• Job application materials (CVs, cover letters, interview notes)
• Web analytics data (see Section 11)

We collect personal information directly from you when you:

• Register on our website or book a class
• Subscribe to our newsletter or mailing list
• Submit a contact form, survey, or feedback
• Send us an email or message

Occasionally we may also collect information from publicly available sources or from third-party service providers (see Section 3).

Where you connect to our services via a third-party platform (such as logging in with Google or Facebook), that service may share registration and profile information with us. The information shared is controlled by the third-party service and your privacy settings with them.

We may also receive supplementary information from trusted third-party partners — for example, fraud detection or verification services — where permitted by law.

We use your personal information to:

• Fulfil and manage the services you have booked with us (your class, package, or programme)
• Process payments and maintain booking records
• Communicate with you about your lessons, enrolment, and any important school notices
• Manage our legal and operational obligations
• Improve our teaching, services, and website
• Send marketing emails where you have given consent — you can opt out at any time
• Connect your details to our booking system (Acuity Scheduling, owned by Squarespace) so that classes can be booked, managed, and confirmed

We may also photograph or video students at performances or events for the purpose of promoting the school. If you would prefer your child not to be included in promotional material, please let us know in writing and we will respect that request without question.

Vocal lessons at the VMA are recorded. Recordings are shared via Dropbox for the following purposes:

• Student practice: So the student can review the lesson and follow their teacher’s guidance at home.
• Under-18s: Recordings are also shared with a parent or guardian, unless they have specifically requested otherwise.
• Teacher review: Teachers may re-listen to sections of a lesson for the purpose of improving their instruction.

Recordings are not shared with any third party outside of these stated purposes.

We only share your personal information where necessary. Recipients may include:

• Your teacher, for the purposes of delivering your lessons
• Third-party service providers who assist us in running the school (see Section 7)
• Our professional advisers — legal, financial, and accounting — based in Ireland
• Regulators or government authorities, where required by law
• Law enforcement agencies, in connection with a criminal investigation or suspected illegal activity
• A prospective purchaser of the business, under appropriate confidentiality arrangements

We do not sell your personal data to any third party.

The following trusted third-party providers are used in the running of our school. Each link leads to their privacy or security information:

All third-party providers we use are world-class services operating to a high standard of data security. Your data is processed in Ireland or the European Economic Area except where a provider is US-based, in which case appropriate data transfer protections apply.

Personal information is stored on secure servers managed by us and our service providers. Security measures include username and password authentication, two-factor authentication where appropriate, and data encryption. Physical records, where they exist, are kept securely at our premises in Ireland.

You have the right to access the personal information we hold about you and to request corrections to any errors. You may also request that we close your account at any time.

To make an access or correction request, please contact us at info@vma.ie.

Where you have given consent, we may send you occasional emails about news, events, and offers from the VMA that we think may be of interest. We do not spam and we do not share your email address with third parties for their marketing purposes.

You can opt out of marketing emails at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any email we send, or by contacting us directly at info@vma.ie.

When you visit our website, certain anonymous information is recorded automatically, including your IP address, browser type, pages visited, time and duration of visits, and the website that referred you to us. This information is used to understand how people use our site and to improve it.

We use cookies to help our website function correctly and to analyse site usage. You can control cookie settings through your browser preferences — however, disabling certain cookies may affect how parts of the site work.

We may on occasion use remarketing — where a visitor to our site later sees a VMA advertisement on another website. This is managed through Google’s advertising tools and is based on anonymous cookie data, not personal information.

Our website is suitable for all ages to browse. However, if you are under 18, any booking, purchase, or submission of personal information on our website should be done with the knowledge and consent of a parent or guardian. It is the responsibility of parents and guardians to monitor their children’s use of our website and services.

We retain your personal information for as long as is necessary to provide our services and to meet our legal obligations. If you request that we delete your information, we will do so, though some data may be retained where we have a legitimate legal reason to do so — for example, to comply with tax or accounting requirements.

As a data controller under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we respect your rights over your personal data. These include the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Request corrections to inaccurate data
• Request erasure of your data (the “right to be forgotten”)
• Restrict or object to how your data is processed
• Receive a copy of your data in a portable format
• Withdraw consent to marketing at any time

Some of these rights are subject to limitations — for example, where we are required by law to retain certain information. If you have concerns about how we handle your data that we are unable to resolve, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Commission of Ireland.

We will update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in law or in how we manage your information. When we do, we will update the version number and date at the top of this page. We will notify you of significant changes where required.

The most current version of this policy is always available at this URL.