Our privacy policy

Here at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) we are committed to keeping your personal information safe and to making sure you know how we will use the details you share with us.

We are legally required to tell you how we will use any information you give us, and give you the opportunity to tell us not to use your information in that way.

We comply with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) with regard to the collection, processing, storage and disclosure of personal information.

What this privacy policy covers

This privacy policy explains:

• Why and how we use cookies on our website.
• How we will use your contact information to keep you up to date by email on the latest news from CLS.
• How we will use your information if you sign up to attend one of our events.
• How we will use your information if you complete a CLS online survey.

We may change our privacy policy from time to time. If we do, you will always find the most up to date version here on our website.

In addition, we have separate and clear arrangements for protecting the information we collect from the participants in our four cohort studies for the purpose of research.

Participants can find out more here:

1958 National Child Development Study
1970 British Cohort Study
Next Steps
Millennium Cohort Study

You can also read our information governance statement for more information.

About us

CLS is home to four of Britain’s leading cohort studies. As well as running these studies, which each have thousands of participants, we train people in how they can use the data we collect in their research.

We also carry out our own research based on our studies, across a wide range of topics. We share our findings to help inform public policy and practice and ultimately improve lives.

CLS is an Economic and Social Research Council resource centre based at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. You can find out more about who we are and what we do on our about us page.

Using cookies to help us improve our website

When you visit our website, you will be asked for your consent to cookies. You are not obliged to give your consent, and you can find more information about changing your cookie preferences below.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that websites store on your browser that include information about your session. Cookies contain information your browser can retrieve, but do not contain programmes, viruses or malicious software. Cookies normally expire after a certain length of time, although that time can be anywhere from a few minutes to more than a year.

Which cookies do we use on this website?

The cookies we use on this website are set by Google Analytics. These give us anonymous statistical data about how people are using our website and what content people are interested in. This information helps us to improve our website.

Can you block cookies?

Most browsers allow you to choose which types of cookies you will accept or to reject all cookies. Below are some guides on managing cookies for different browsers:

Firefox

Internet Explorer

Chrome

Safari

Contacting you by email

We manage an email mailing list of people who have given their consent for us to contact them by signing up to hear about the latest CLS news and events.

If you are on this list, these are the types of things we might tell you about by email:

• Opportunities to have your say on what we do, including scientific consultations on future study surveys.
• Invitations to events we are holding or are involved in.
• The latest data releases from our studies.
• New research we’ve published and/or research by other people who use our studies.
• New resources on our website.

From time to time, we might update you on other things that do not fit into one of the above categories. But anything we do send you will be directly relevant to what is happening at CLS.

At the moment we use third party software to help us manage our mailing list and to distribute emails. The software we currently use is provided by a company called Mailchimp. You can read more about Mailchimp’s privacy policy on its website.

When you sign up to our mailing list, you will be asked to provide certain information including your name, email address, job title, organisation, geographic region, discipline, and your contact preferences. This information is collected via a Mailchimp sign up page and stored in CLS’s Mailchimp account. The account is password protected and is only accessible to certain CLS employees.

When we email you, you will always have the option to unsubscribe from future notifications or update your contact details. You can also do this at any other time by emailing us at ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk.

The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change your address or believe any of the information we hold concerning you is out of date, please email ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk.

If you have subscribed to our mailing list, we will continue to hold your personal information until you unsubscribe. We may also remove you from our mailing list if your email address becomes invalid, or you do not open five or more of our emails in a row.

Registering for our events

We hold a range of different events, from training workshops and webinars to help researchers find their way around our studies, to conferences and briefings on new cohort research.

When you register to attend one of our events, our booking form will ask you for certain information. This includes your name and email address, job title, organisation, geographic regions, and main area of research interest. We aim to make our events as positive an experience as possible for everyone, so we may ask if you have any special dietary or accessibility requirements as well.

We normally use third party software called Eventbrite to take event bookings and to collect this information. You can read more about Eventbrite’s privacy policy on its website.

At our academic and policy events, we distribute hardcopy delegate lists to event attendees in order to facilitate discussion and networking. The lists include the names, email addresses and organisations of all delegates. We process your information for the delegate list under legitimate interest. Delegate lists are a common document for academic or policy-focused events. The lists ensure our delegates have an opportunity to network effectively with their professional peers, and encourages collaboration between those who use our longitudinal data and resources in a professional capacity. These activities are a core purpose of CLS academic and policy events.

If we are intending to distribute a delegate list at an event, we will inform you when you register, and give you an opportunity to opt out. There is no obligation for you to share your information in this way, and if you change your mind at any time before the event, you can notify ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk to have your details removed. We do not distribute delegate lists for public or participant events.

We will use the details you give us to get in touch with you before the event and to follow up with you afterwards. This is likely to include reminders and notifications of any changes to the event, sending you relevant presentations or reports related to the event, as well as asking you to tell us what you thought of the event, so we can keep improving how we do things.

We use third party online survey software called Qualtrics to collect feedback from you.  You can find out more about Qualtrics’ privacy policy on its website. We also use Microsoft Forms for surveys, you can see their privacy info here. Please see also the section below on responding to CLS online surveys.

We also store information collected from event registration forms and feedback surveys securely on our internal server. The file is password protected and accessible only to CLS employees. We use this information to evaluate our event programme as a whole, and to plan our future activities. This information is also used for internal reporting purposes, and to inform our funders of the reach and success of our events. Only aggregate information is provided for reporting purposes, and no individual or identifying information is included in our reports. If you have registered for one of our events, we will continue to hold your personal information for evaluation purposes only for the remainder of our current grant period (no more than five years).

As much as we’d love to stay in touch, when you register for one of our events we won’t add you to our mailing list unless you ask us to, in line with the General Data Protection Regulations. This means you won’t automatically receive details of future events and other CLS news. If you would like to hear from us again, you’ll be able to sign up to our mailing list from the information we send you about the event you registered for. You can also join our mailing list at any time by emailing us at ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk.

Completing an online survey

We occasionally use online surveys to collect submissions to scientific consultations and conference calls for papers, and as event feedback forms (as described above). Each survey will ask you to provide different information relevant to its purpose, although most will ask for your name, email and organisation. In every survey, we will tell you how the information will be stored and shared.

We use third party online survey software called Qualtrics to collect feedback from you. You can find out more about Qualtrics’ privacy policy on its website. We also use Microsoft Forms for surveys, you can see their privacy info here.

We also store the information collected from our online surveys on our internal server. The files are password protected and accessible only to CLS employees. We use this information to plan our future activities (such as conferences or upcoming sweeps of data collection) or to evaluate our past activities (such as events). This information is also used for internal reporting purposes. Only aggregate information is provided for reporting purposes, and no individual or identifying information is included in our reports. If you have completed a CLS online survey, we will continue to hold your personal information for internal use only for the remainder of our current grant period (no more than five years).

Your rights

You have a wide range of individual rights under the General Data Protection Regulations, including the right to ask us to update or remove the information we hold about you at any time, or to give you the information we hold about you. Your individual rights include the right to object to the processing of your personal data at any time.

For more information about this, or to make a complaint about how we have handled your data, please contact UCL’s Data Protection Officer: data-protection@ucl.ac.uk.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this policy, or need to contact CLS for any other reason, please visit our contact us page.

Last updated: November 2019