Privacy notice: practice education survey

How Social Work England will manage responses to its practice education survey

Social Work England will process your responses to the practice education survey questions and metadata about how you complete the survey. This includes (all of the below):

• any responses given to attitudinal questions that ask you about your experiences at work
• open-ended questions where you leave a comment
• any responses given to demographic questions that ask about your job characteristics (sector type and region of your work)
• any response given to equality, diversity and inclusion questions
• completion times for survey

Your participation in this survey is voluntary.

You can complete this survey anonymously. There is also an option to provide your email address to be kept updated about the work. We won’t use this email for any other purpose, but if you choose to provide it, your answers will be linked to the email address you give on our survey platform (Smart Survey). If you wish to keep your response fully anonymous, but also be kept informed about the project, email us on practice.education@socialworkengland.org.uk to request future updates.

While we do not ask you to identify yourself, it may be possible in a small number of cases for individuals to be identifiable from a combination of their responses. There is also the potential that despite our request not to, individuals may in error disclose personal data in the free text boxes. For this reason we treat survey data as personal data.

Purpose

This survey is part of wider work being done by Social Work England.  In our business plan we committed to:

• Build a more in-depth knowledge of the practice education landscape to inform and support the critical role of practice educators, including potential regulatory levers.

We know that practice educators play a pivotal role; our work on practice education is a key part of our ambition to raise the standard of social work education across the country. 

The survey will inform this work.

Lawful basis

Our lawful basis for processing your personal data in relation to this survey is Article 6(1)(e) of the UK GDPR, ‘processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller’.

Recipients of the survey responses

All individual-level responses to the survey will be seen by our data and analysis function. We may disclose your data in compliance with a Freedom of Information request or in response to a court order or other legal obligation where it would not breach your data protection rights to do so.

Results will be aggregated. We advise you not to disclose any personal information in your comments which might identify yourself or others.

Retention

Social Work England will hold your data for statistical purposes for 6 years after the date the survey is completed (there is regularly the requirement to do time series analysis), at which point retention will be reviewed. If the data are no longer in use at this point, they will be deleted; if they are still in use, they will be retained, but their retention will (from then on) be reviewed on an annual basis. 

Your data will be held by our survey supplier (Smart Survey) for up to 24 months after the date the survey is completed, or when asked by us to delete it. 

Aggregate results from the survey do not count as personal data and will therefore be kept indefinitely, or until they are no longer considered useful. 

Your rights

All data received through the practice education survey is classed as personal data even though it is provided anonymously. That is because in certain circumstances certain individuals may be identifiable through their sector type, region of work and comments.

It should be made clear that there is no intention to attempt to identify any individuals from the data. Precautions are also in place to prevent this, however for data protection purposes the survey information is being treated with the same requirements as identifiable data.

The data collected as part of the survey is done so in an anonymised format. This does limit your data protection rights to the information provided in your survey response.

Complaints

If you consider your personal data has been misused or mishandled, please contact our Data Protection and Information Governance Team at information.requests@socialworkengland.org.uk.

You also have the right to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), who are an independent regulator. Details of how to contact the ICO can be found here https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/. 

We are committed to providing the best service we can in all the interactions we have with all those who use our services.

If you have any feedback about this survey, or want to tell us where we could have done better, we want to hear from you. Your feedback, including complaints, will help us to learn from our mistakes and from what we’ve done well to improve the quality of our services. You can complete a feedback form.

Contact details

Social Work England is the data controller for your data. If you have any further questions, please email the Social Work England practice education team at practice.education@socialworkengland.org.uk.