Who we are
The Department for Education (DfE): The Department for Education is responsible for children’s services and education, including early years, schools, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.
IFF Research: IFF Research is an independent social and market research agency, working across the public, private and voluntary sectors.
IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society: UCL IOE is a world-leading centre for research and teaching in education and social science. Their research addresses society’s most important challenges and their teaching inspires students by providing them with first-hand experience of leading-edge research and knowledge creation.
For more information, please visit the websites below.
• Department for Education
• IFF Research
• UCL IOE
Roles
For the purposes of this work, under the definitions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the role of each involved party is as follows:
• The Data Controller: The Department for Education (DfE)
• Data Processor and Sub-Processor: IFF Research and UCL IOE
• Data Subjects: Teachers and Leaders
How we will use your information
The survey is hosted and disseminated on behalf of the Department by IFF Research. They will receive your personal data from your survey responses, which they will anonymise before sharing with DfE.
We will also receive some personal data from the School’s Workforce Census (SWC), which collects data on all teaching and support staff in regular employment, and DfE’s Online Teacher CPD Service platform. These are statutory data collection exercises that take place each year and are used to inform Departmental policy. Data is collected on the “collect once, use many times” principle.
The aim for this project is to help DfE to design policies that better support teachers and leaders. Specifically, it will look at in-school factors in recruitment and retention of teachers (e.g. school culture, leadership, opportunities for progression, and relationships among colleagues) according to an intersection of factors such as phase, subject area, length of service, gender, race/ethnic background.
DfE will receive an anonymised dataset of survey responses from IFF Research. To ensure that survey responses can be fully understood and explored, your survey responses will be linked to information about you which the Department for Education (DfE) already holds, or which it is lawfully permitted access (for example data may be linked to Get Information About Schools (GIAS) and to the School Workforce Census). Despite this, your survey responses will remain confidential at all times, with data linking completed by IFF via an anonymous identifier. Furthermore, analysis will not be broken down by individual teachers or schools, so neither individuals nor schools will be identifiable from the analysis and reporting.
Your survey responses will be kept entirely confidential, in line with the Code of Conduct of the Market Research Society and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): linked information will be anonymised before sending to DfE and will be used for the sole purposes of education research. DfE and any organisation granted access to the data will hold it securely and not publish, share, or otherwise disclose information which identifies or makes it possible to identify any individual or school participating in the survey.
A report of findings will be published after each wave of the research. The anonymised dataset will be published on the Government’s online data archive and be made available, subject to DfE’s approval, to other researchers.
The nature of your personal data that we will be using
The categories of your personal data that we will be using for this project are:
• your full name
• gender
• age
• contact information (email address and telephone number)
• ethnic origin
• health data
• medical conditions
• home life (e.g., demographic questions)
• you/your family’s financial and employment situation
• school name
When our use of your personal data is lawful
In order for our use of your personal data to be lawful, we need to meet one (or more) conditions in the data protection legislation. For the purpose of this project, the relevant conditions are:
• Article 6 (1)(e) GDPR, to perform a public task as part of our function as a department
• Article 9 (2)(g) under the substantial public interest condition
Who we will make your personal data available to
We sometimes need to use other research organisations to help us deliver large pieces of work. In such instances we have a contract with these organisations. For the purposes of this project our contracted partners IFF Research and UCL IOE have been employed to process your personal data on our behalf.
How long we will keep your personal data
DfE will keep an anonymised version of your personal data for future analysis, as per the GDPR exemption on retaining personal data used for scientific, or historical research purposes in accordance with Article 89 (1).
We will retain your contact details after each year of the study, unless you request that they are removed. This will allow us to invite you to take part in the subsequent waves of the study. If the study continues beyond the initially planned five years, we will ask you at the end of the Year 5 survey if you are happy to be recontacted the following year. In addition, from the second year of the survey we may use your contact details to contact you about related follow up research – this will be within 12 months of you agreeing to recontact for this purpose. If you do not agree to this, you will not be contacted for follow up research.
Your data protection rights
Participation in this research is voluntary. By taking part in the survey you will be consenting to your anonymised responses to be linked with data DfE already holds, or which it is lawfully permitted access, as set out in the ‘How we will use your information’ section above.
More information about how DfE handles personal information is published here.
Under UK data protection law, participants have the right to request a copy of their data, change their data, or withdraw from the research at any time. Anyone who wishes to do this can contact a member of the IFF Research team via email at Workinglivesofteachersandleaders@IFFResearch.com.
Further information about your data protection rights appears on the Information Commissioner’s website.
Last updated
We may need to update this privacy notice periodically so we recommend that you revisit this information from time to time. This version was last updated on 18th January 2023.
Contact information
If you have any questions about how your personal information will be used, please contact us and enter Working Lives of Teachers survey as a reference. For the Data Protection Officer (DPO) please contact us and mark it for the attention of the ‘DPO’.