Privacy and Anonymity
Answer honestly without wondering who’ll see what you said
People are more likely to give useful answers when they can trust the process they are taking part in. Educity Voice is therefore designed so that an individual respondent cannot be identified by their school from the survey response they submit. That principle affects what we ask for, how responses are stored and what schools are able to access afterwards.
Your school cannot identify your individual response
A school using Educity does not receive a spreadsheet of individual answers, a respondent-by-respondent response view, and can’t search for your name and see how you answered. Educity analyses the responses and presents results in aggregated form.
Where there is not enough information to report something responsibly, Educity is designed to withhold that result rather than display a very small group in a way that could make individual responses easier to infer.
The school receives evidence about patterns of experience, not a list showing what each person said.
Your submitted survey response does not contain your identity
You do not create an individual Educity account to complete Educity Voice.
Your submitted survey response is not connected to your name, email address or a respondent account.
Educity Open does not ask free-text questions. That reduces the risk of somebody accidentally identifying themselves or another person through something they write.
What does a survey link tell Educity?
Your school distributes Educity Voice links through its own communication channels. Some survey links represent a particular group that the school has chosen to analyse. For example, a pupil link can represent a year group and SEN provision. A Parent & Carer Voice link represents the number of children the respondent has at the school. A staff link can represent a line manager and department.
Those groups help Educity analyse patterns across the school. The survey link does not need to identify the individual person who completes it, and the school still does not receive access to their individual response afterwards.
What about demographic questions?
Educity Voice can include a small number of demographic questions. These are closed-choice questions and they are optional. You can leave them unanswered and still submit your survey.
Where demographic information is used in reporting, it is used to understand patterns across groups rather than to create a respondent identity. Educity also applies reporting controls where there is not enough information to show a result responsibly.
Parents and carers do not identify their children
Parent & Carer Voice recognises that multiple children from the same family can have very different experiences of the same school. If you have more than one child at the school, you can therefore answer the experience questions separately for each of them.
You are not asked to enter their names or another child identifier. Where several children are involved, Educity simply distinguishes them within the survey as Child 1, Child 2 and so on.
Nothing is submitted while you’re halfway through
While you complete Educity Voice, your progress is stored locally in your browser. Educity does not build up a partial server-side survey response question by question. If you abandon the survey before submitting, there is no completed response for your school to receive or analyse.
When you submit, Educity stores the finished survey as one complete response.
What your school knows and what your response contains are different things
Your school may already know that you were invited to take part in its survey. For example, it may send Pupil Voice links through a particular year group, Parent & Carer Voice to its families, or Staff Voice through its own staff communications. That does not mean Educity attaches the school’s contact list to the answers it receives.
Educity does not require the school to upload respondent email addresses or an address book in order to distribute Voice. The school manages its communication with respondents. Educity receives the anonymous survey response.
Why can’t I retrieve my answer afterwards?
Anonymity has consequences.
If Educity kept an identity alongside every response so that we could later find exactly which one was yours, that would undermine the protection we are trying to provide. There is therefore no respondent account where you can sign back in and browse your submitted answers. Your school cannot ask Educity to reveal which submitted response belonged to you.
Once submitted, the response becomes part of the anonymous evidence used in Educity analysis.
Staff can separately volunteer for future research
After completing Staff Voice, a member of staff may be invited to express an interest in taking part in future Educity research.
This is optional and happens after the anonymous survey has been submitted. If you choose to provide contact details, they are collected through a separate process. The research-interest record is deliberately not given the survey response ID, campaign, school, distribution group or another technical identifier that would reconnect your contact information to the answers you just submitted.
Giving us your contact details for future research therefore does not turn your anonymous Voice response into an identified response. This invitation is not currently used for Pupil Voice or Parent & Carer Voice.
How long is survey information kept?
Educity needs to retain operational survey information for a period so that reports can be produced, supported and governed properly.
The current Educity Open design retains operational response data for two years after the relevant report is published. Data intended to contribute to longer-term Educity benchmarking must first be converted into a de-identified form that does not retain the operational identifiers used to run the original school survey.
The privacy notice presented with a live Educity Voice survey remains the authoritative notice for that particular survey and explains the applicable processing in more detail.
Privacy is broader than your anonymous survey response
You may provide personal information to Educity in other contexts. For example, you might contact us for support, create an administrator account for your school, or, if you are a member of staff, separately volunteer your contact details for future research. Those are different activities from completing an anonymous Educity Voice response and may legitimately require information such as your name or email address.
We keep those purposes separate. If you contact Educity about a technical problem with a survey, you do not need to send us your survey answers.
What does my school receive?
Your school receives analysed Educity results rather than identifiable individual response records.
As Educity develops, those reports are designed to help schools understand:
- patterns across different parts of educational experience;
- differences between relevant groups where there is enough information to report them safely;
- where pupils, parents and carers, and staff broadly see the same experience;
- where those perspectives differ.
What the school does not receive is a record saying that a named pupil, parent, carer or member of staff gave a particular set of answers.
Optional research participation
Some staff respondents may be invited, after completing Educity Voice, to register interest in future research. This is entirely optional. Any contact details provided are collected through a separate process and are not linked to the respondent’s survey answers, survey campaign or organisation. Registering interest has no effect on the survey or its reporting.
Questions about privacy or anonymity?
If you have a question about how Educity handles information, you can contact us. Please do not include your survey answers or unnecessary personal information when you contact us. If your question is about why your school is running Educity Voice or how it intends to respond to the results, your school may be the better organisation to ask.