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

The EEF does not itself process any personal data for evaluation purposes.

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.