Our studies
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.
This privacy policy explains:
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
COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities Study
Children of the 2020s
Generation New Era
You can also read our information governance statement for more information.
CLS is home to some of Britain’s leading cohort studies. As well as running these studies, which each have thousands of participants, we train researchers in how they can use the data we collect in their work.
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 IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. You can find out more about who we are and what we do on our about us page.
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.
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.
Find out more about our cookies on the Cookies page.
We manage an email mailing list of people who have given their consent for us to contact them by email, or who have a legitimate interest in receiving updates from CLS.
Those on our email list have the option of subscribing to our two newsletters, each sent twice a year:
Those on our mailing list will also receive occasional invitations to relevant events and consultations, and other special announcements.
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 DotDigital. You can read more about DotDigital’s privacy policy on its website.
When you sign up to our mailing list, you will be asked to provide your name, email address, and your contact preferences. This information is collected via a DotDigital sign up page and stored in CLS’s DotDigital 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 messages or update your preferences and contact details. You can also do this at any other time by visiting the DotDigital Update your preferences page.
The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change your email address or believe any of the information we hold concerning you is out of date, please update your preferences or email ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk.
If you unsubscribe from our mailing list, you will not receive any further emails from us. However, we may need to retain your email address in our DotDigital account for a period of time to ensure you are not inadvertently resubscribed. 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.
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 primarily use third party online survey software called Microsoft Forms to take event bookings and to collect this information. You can read more about Microsoft’s privacy policy on its website.
At our academic and policy events, we may choose to 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 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 primarily use third party online survey software called Microsoft Forms to collect feedback from you. You can read more about Microsoft’s privacy policy on its website.
We also 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 store information collected from event registration forms and feedback surveys securely on our internal server. These files are 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).
If you have registered for one of our events in a professional capacity, we will automatically add you to our mailing list unless you ask us not to. You will have the option to opt-out of our mailing list on the event registration form. If you are unsure whether you opted out, please email ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk.
If you have registered for one of our events as a student or in a personal capacity, we will not automatically add you to our mailing list, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. You can subscribe to our mailing list any time on our sign-up page.
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 a third party online survey software called Microsoft Forms to collect feedback from you. You can read more about Microsoft’s privacy policy on its website.
We also use another third party online survey software called Qualtrics for this. You can find out more about Qualtrics’ privacy policy on its website.
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 help shape our future activities. This might include planning the programme of our scientific conferences or developing the content of upcoming sweeps of data collection.
We also aggregate information for internal reporting purposes. 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 evaluation purposes for the remainder of our current grant period (no more than five years).
If you have responded to one of our consultations or surveys in a professional capacity, we will automatically add you to our mailing list unless you ask us not to. You will have the option to opt-out of our mailing list on the online submission form. If you are unsure whether you opted out, please email ioe.clscomms@ucl.ac.uk.
If you have responded to one of our consultations or surveys as a student or in a personal capacity, we will not automatically add you to our mailing list, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. You can subscribe to our mailing list any time on our sign-up page.
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.
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: April 2024.
Find the latest developments and insights from across all our longitudinal studies.
Our bibliography is a searchable database of published work based on our cohort studies. Search by keyword, author, date range and journal.
Data from our studies are mainly available through the UK Data Service. We run training to support researchers who are interested in using our studies in their work.
Centre for Longitudinal Studies
UCL Social Research Institute
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Email: clsdata@ucl.ac.uk
