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.

London Economics: London Economics is one of Europe’s leading specialist policy and economics consultancies. They advise public and private sector clients on economic and financial analysis, policy development and evaluation, business strategy, and regulatory and competition policy.

For more information, please visit the websites below.

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:

• Data Controller: The Department for Education (DfE)
• Data Processor and Sub-Processor: IFF Research (IFF) and London Economics
• Data Subjects: Childcare and Early Years Providers

Who will have access to my personal data?

The survey is hosted and disseminated on behalf of the Department by IFF Research. IFF will have access to data files that include the name and address of the childcare provider as well as details of the email address, phone number and/or named contact person, taken from Ofsted records or the school census. London Economics will have access to provider information relevant solely for the purposes of matching data to other administrative datasets for the purposes of financial analysis. This would remove the necessity for participants to be recontacted for information that has already been collected.

IFF Research and London Economics will also have access to your answers to the survey. All responses will be pseudonymised before being analysed. Pseudonymised means that your personal data can no longer be attributed to you without the use of additional information.  Such additional information is stored separately and securely by IFF Research, and can be accessed by IFF only for the purposes of this research only.

Central Mailing, the printing company who are printing the survey materials for the project, will have access to your contact details. This is to send letters inviting you to take part. As an approved supplier, Central Mailing is compliant with IFF’s information security policies and data protection legislation.

How we will use your information

The results of this survey are used by DfE and other researchers to understand and analyse change in the childcare and early years sector. Results will be published as anonymised Official Statistics which will be used by the Government and its agencies to inform decisions about childcare provision. You can view previous years’ publications here.

DfE will receive a dataset of survey responses from IFF Research through secure transfer. To ensure that survey responses can be fully understood and explored, your survey responses may 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 the Early Years Census. Despite this, your survey responses will remain confidential at all times. Furthermore, analysis will not be broken down by individual providers, so neither individual settings nor providers 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 pseudonymised 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 setting or provider participating in the survey.

A report of findings will be published after each wave of the research. An anonymised copy of the dataset will be published on the Government’s online data archive and be made available, subject to DfE’s approval, to other researchers.

Why our use of your personal data is lawful

For our use of your personal data to be lawful, we need to meet one (or more) conditions in the data protection legislation. For 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.

How long we will keep your personal data

DfE will keep a pseudonymised 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).

IFF securely delete any personal data that is collected as part of the research, once the project is complete. If you give us to consent to do so at the end of the survey, IFF, DfE and LE may use your contact details to contact you about related 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 the 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 the DfE handles personal information is published here.

Under the UK Data Protection Act 2018, you are entitled to ask if we hold information relating to you and ask for a copy, by making a ‘subject access request’.

For further information and how to request your data, please use the ‘contact form’ in the Personal Information Charteration under the ‘How to find out what personal information we hold about you’ section.

If you need to contact us regarding any of the above, please do so via the DfE site here.

Further information about your data protection rights appears on the Information Commissioner’s website here.

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 23/03/22.

Contact Information

If you have any questions about how your personal information will be used, please contact us at https://www.gov.uk/contact-dfe and enter Survey of Childcare and Early Years Providers as a reference. For the Data Protection Officer (DPO) please contact us via gov.uk and mark it for the attention of the ‘DPO’.

You also have the right to ask for and have your survey answers deleted at any point up until we delete the data. We expect this to be 12 months after the report has been published. We expect to publish the report in December 2023. After this point all data will be analysed in a way that means it is no longer possible to identify individual settings. 

If you have taken part in the survey but would like to withdraw your data, please contact childcareproviders@iffresearch.com with your unique reference number, which can be found at the top of any letters or emails you have received about the survey.

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