Education Endowment Foundation:Guidance on data protection for schools and settings involved in an EEF-funded project

Guidance on data protection for schools and settings involved in an EEF-funded project

Guidance on data protection for schools and settings involved in an EEF-funded project

For the majority of projects funded by the EEF, we do not process any personal data required for delivering or evaluating the project until it reaches the EEF data archive. Please see the Evaluations section below for further information.

This privacy notice provides information about the projects where EEF do use contact details from schools or other settings involved in our funded work. Examples of this include organisations involved in the NELI programme or the Accelerator Fund. This page should be read in conjunction with our privacy notice which covers information relevant to anyone whose data is used by the EEF, including your rights.

Purpose and lawful basis for processing

EEF use your contact details for the purposes of monitoring and evaluation of the projects that we fund to review what impact they made and if they were a success.

The processing is necessary to fulfil these legitimate interests.

Who we share your data with

Your contact details may be shared with or provided by organisations that are helping us to meet the above purpose. This could be for if we commission an independent evaluation or the DfE is conducting an evaluation. For example, for Accelerator Fund projects, the DfE is planning to commission an independent evaluator to study the EEF’s Accelerator Fund activity to gather and share useful lessons. The EEF may share contact details of the staff member who signed up to the project with the DfE appointed evaluator, who may get in touch about taking part in the evaluation e.g. completing a survey. This is not a requirement of taking part and will not be designed to be labour-intensive.

How long we keep it

We will retain your contact details until they are no longer required by EEF after the project is completed and any associated statutory periods have expired. Purposes for keeping information after project completion include project reviews, audit investigations and retaining evidence associated with the Limitation Act.

What are your rights?

As we are processing your personal data for our legitimate interests as stated above, you have the right to object to our processing of your personal data. Please be aware that they may legitimate reasons why we may refuse your objection.

Evaluations

For the most part, the EEF does not process any personal data required for delivering or evaluating its funded projects until it reaches the EEF data archive.

Evaluation data are processed: a) during the evaluation project by independent evaluation teams and project delivery teams; and b) after the evaluation has been completed and the data archived by the EEF’s archive manager.

Privacy notices for each individual evaluation project are issued by independent evaluation and/​or project delivery teams at the start of the project. 

The privacy notice of our archive manager (data processor), FFT Education (FFT), is available online here.

In the interest of transparency and clarity, we have written a document – available online here – to explain the EEF’s approach to data protection with regards to its evaluation activities.

Education Data Service

The Education Data Service (EDS) aims to create estimates of impact by identifying schools working with specific programmes and then, using the National Pupil Database (NPD) and other datasets, creating groups of schools with similar observable characteristics. This approach offers a transparent and methodologically-sound way to compare the outcomes of ​‘treatment schools’ and schools with similar characteristics (‘matched comparison schools’) to estimate the impact of those programmes. More information on the EDS is available here.

The EEF does not itself process any data used in the Education Data Service (EDS) project.

Users of the EDS are organisations working in educational settings, such as schools, local authorities and education charities, and wanting to demonstrate promising evidence of impact on teaching and learning outcomes, possibly to inform an application for an EEF grant. The EEF is funding a feasibility pilot of the EDS in order to understand how to maximise the quality of evidence generated by the service.

EDS users collect data directly from the educational settings, pupils, teachers and parents that they work with. This data includes background information (such as socio-demographics), prior educational attainment and information on the education programme being delivered to these participants. We need this data in order to link to outcomes data in the National Pupil Database (NPD) held by the Department for Education (DfE), or other outcomes data sources. These data are linked either by EEF’s EDS data processor, FFT Education, or by DfE, and matched with similar education settings and pupils who did not receive the programme.

In the interest of transparency and clarity, we have written a document – available online here – to explain the EEF’s approach to data protection with regards to the EDS.