To help us to better understand the data collected in the Horizons study, we ask your consent to link information about you held in various administrative records to your answers. If you do not give consent to linking this information, then we will not do this. However, we may provide further information and ask you again about permissions you’ve declined, in case you have changed your mind. We may also ask consent for additional administrative data records to be linked to your answers in the future. Whether you agree to these requests is entirely optional.
To add this information, we first create a unique ID for you, a unique identifier which is a string of letters and numbers. We then securely send your unique ID and some personal details such as your name, sex, address and date of birth, to the relevant government departments and agencies or to another organisation acting on their behalf. The unique ID allows us to identify your administrative records without identifying you.
Your personal details are only used to find your administrative records. Once identified, the information from your records is made available to the Horizons team with your unique ID only.
The Horizons team then match your administrative information to your survey responses using your unique ID.
This matched administrative and survey information will be used for research purposes only and under restricted access conditions.
You can agree for us to add information from all, some, or none of the sources we ask about – it’s your choice.
We will add information from your past, present and future records, and we will collect it on an ongoing basis for the duration of the study – unless you tell us to stop.
When we first interviewed you, we asked your permission to add some of your information held by the following organisations:
For DfE, DWP, and HMRC, if you have not previously given your permission to add information held by these organisations, we will ask for your permission again, in case you have changed your mind. We will not ask you again about records held by EEF or HEAT regardless of your decision the first time around, which we will continue to respect.
At the second survey, we will ask your permission to add higher education records held by:
We would like to add all this administrative data to your survey answers to create a more accurate picture of your life and experiences. We would only do so for research purposes, never to make decisions about what happens to you individually in the future. We will ask your permission to link this information during the survey; it is up to you whether or not to agree to this.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) is a charity and is the UK’s shared admissions service for higher education. Records kept by UCAS include information about higher education applications and offers.
Records kept by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) include information about participation and achievement in school, further and higher education as well as details about the school, college, university or training centre you attended.
The Student Loans Company (SLC) is a non-profit making government-owned organisation that administers loans and grants to students in colleges and universities in the UK, and is sponsored by the DfE. Records kept by SLC include information about payments of student support.
The Department for Education’s (DfE) National Pupil Database (NPD) and Individualised Learner Record (ILR) hold information about you and your education. This includes your participation and achievement in school and further education as well as details about the school, college, or training centre you attended. This also includes information about your ethnicity, special educational needs, and free school meals.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), holds information about benefit claims and participation in employment programmes, and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) holds information about employment, earnings, tax credits, occupational pensions and National Insurance contributions. This will provide information on, for example, your employment status in the future and how much you are earning once you start a job. This, together with the DfE’s education administrative data (NPD and ILR, discussed above), is called the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data.
The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) was an initiative which provided funding to schools in England to help with one-to-one or group tuition for pupils. It was run by the Education Endowment Foundation in the 2020-21 academic year. Their data provides information on any tutoring that you may have received as part of the National Tutoring Programme.
The Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) services, monitors and evaluates universities’ outreach programmes to track students’ progression from school into Higher Education and beyond. Their data provides information on any outreach activities that you may have been part of which are tracked by HEAT.
Adding other information from your education records will help us to understand better young people’s experiences during the pandemic, and explore the long-term educational and career outcomes associated with these experiences. It will also enable researchers to carry out more detailed research on things like:
The information you have provided in the survey allows researchers to examine a whole range of issues like the financial benefits of education and training, the importance of education during the pandemic on a person’s income as an adult, and social mobility, which is the extent to which people’s social class or economic status changes between youth and adulthood.
It is very difficult to collect accurate information about income within questionnaires. The increasingly complex benefits system makes collecting information about benefit receipt particularly difficult.
We are therefore asking for your permission to gain access to the economic data that HMRC and DWP will hold about you once you start working and receiving your own income. This will include information about any tax credits that you receive, your National Insurance contributions, your earnings, and benefits that you receive, as well as information about your participation in DWP programmes.
This would allow researchers to look at important questions such as:
The linked information will be made available to researchers via the UK Data Service (UKDS), UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC), the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service (ONS SRS) or similar organisations. Access to the data will only be granted in a secure research environment and after a successful application, assessed and approved by the Horizons team and by the government department or organisation who provided the linked data (if required). This is to make sure this information is used responsibly and safely.
The linked survey and administrative information will be used for research purposes only. Like your study responses, this information will be used by professional researchers for non-commercial research and statistics.
Information provided to researchers will never contain your name, address or date of birth.
This is a decision that you might want to involve your parent(s) in, so we would like you to discuss this with them, if you wish. However, it is your choice.
No. You can agree for us to add information from all of the records we ask about, from just some of the records or to add nothing at all – it’s your choice.
Yes. Whatever decision you make, we would still really like you to take part in the survey.
There is no end date on the permissions that you give as it is not known exactly when your information will be added. Horizons will collect these records on an ongoing basis unless you tell us to stop.
If Horizons has already added some of your information, it will continue to be used for research purposes only, but no further information from your records will be added.
You can change your permissions at any time, without giving a reason, including those you have in the first survey. You can withdraw permissions by contacting the Horizons helpline on 0800 051 0889 or getting in touch with us via email at horizonsresearch@veriangroup.com.
We keep your data for as long as is required for the purposes of the Horizons longitudinal study and our statutory and legal obligations. Further information on how long we keep records for is included in UCL’s records retention schedule.
