Costs of delivering functional skills - Participant information leaflet

Study Title:	Functional skills – cost and content
Investigator(s):	Peter Dickinson, Beate Baldauf and Lorraine Johnstone (Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick)

Introduction

You are invited to take part in a research study. Before you decide, you need to understand why the research is being done and what it would involve for you. Please read the following information carefully. Please contact us if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Take the time to decide whether or not you wish to take part.

A downloadable version of this leaflet is available here.

Who is organising and funding the study?

The study is being funded by the Edge Foundation and the Gatsby Foundation. It is being undertaken in association with the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) and Association of Colleges (AoC).

What is the study about?

The study is exploring whether the costs and funding of functional skills differs between embedded provision (in Apprenticeships ) and stand-alone provision.

Do I have to take part?

Your participation in this interview is entirely voluntary and you can withdraw at any time without giving a reason.

What would taking part involve?

It will involve a telephone or Teams interview with an IER researcher which should last about 45-60 minutes, you can decide which you would prefer.

Any information you provide will be kept securely in a password-protected folder at the University of Warwick for the purposes of the research.

What are the possible benefits of taking part in this study?

It will help inform discussions of the funding of functional skills in Apprenticeship provision.

What are the possible disadvantages, side effects or risks, of taking part?

There are no anticipated risks to you as a research participant.

Expenses and payments

There will be no payment for taking part in the project.

Will my taking part be kept confidential?

Yes. We will follow strict ethical and legal practice and all information about you will be handled in confidence. All the information and data you provide will be pseudonymised, this means your contact details will not be stored in the same file as your interview data. All data will be stored securely in a password-protected folder at Warwick University. Only the named researcher will have access to the data. No interview data will be transferred outside of the University of Warwick.

If during the course of the interview you disclose anything which may highlight harm to you or to others, the interviewers have a duty of care to report this to the relevant authorities, but otherwise, your confidentiality will be maintained throughout.

What will happen to the data collected about me?

As a publicly-funded organisation, we have to ensure that it is in the public interest when we use personally-identifiable information from people who have agreed to take part in research. This means that we will only use your data in the ways needed to conduct and analyse this research study.

We will be using information from you in order to undertake this study and will act as the data controller for this study. We are committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with data protection legislation. The University of Warwick will destroy contact details immediately after the end of the project (November 2023). Consent information will be kept securely for 10 years after the study has finished and then destroyed securely.

Research data will be pseudonymised as quickly as possible after data collection. This means all direct and indirect identifiers will be removed from the research data and will be replaced with a participant number. The key to identification will be stored separately and securely to the research data to safeguard your identity. It will be possible for us to withdraw your data up to 3 weeks after the data has been collected and this data will then be securely destroyed if you wish us to do so.

Data Sharing

Data will not be shared with any other organisation.

Your rights to access, change or move your information are limited, as we need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. The University of Warwick has in place policies and procedures to keep your data safe.

Please refer to the University of Warwick Research Privacy Notice which is available here: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/idc/dataprotection/privacynotices/researchprivacynotice or by contacting the Information and Data Compliance Team at infocompliance@warwick.ac.uk.

What will happen if I don’t want to carry on being part of the study?

Participation is entirely voluntary, and a decision to withdraw participation from the study without giving a reason, will not affect you in any way. If you decide to withdraw from the study, please tell us before or during the interview and we will destroy your contact details securely and will not contact you again for the purposes of this research. You can stop the interview at any point without giving a reason if you do not want the interview to continue.

After the interview you will have three weeks to withdraw your data. This can be done by contacting the interviewer. It will not be possible to withdraw your data 3 weeks after data has been collected. To safeguard your rights, we will use minimum personally-identifiable information and keep the data secure in line with the University’s Information and Data Compliance policies.

What will happen to the results of the study?

The findings of the study will be presented in a report to the Edge Foundation and Gatsby Foundation. All data will be presented in an aggregate form e.g. in tables and graphs. The report will be made available on the University of Warwick’s website.

Who has reviewed the study?

This study has been reviewed and given favourable opinion by the University of Warwick’s Humanities and Social Science Research Ethics Committee (HSSREC).

Who should I contact if I want further information?

If you have any questions about any aspect of the study, or your participation in it, not answered by this participant information sheet, please contact:

Peter Dickinson at p.dickinson@warwick.ac.uk; or

Stef Poole at Stefanie.Poole@warwick.ac.uk

Who should I contact if I wish to make a complaint?

Any complaint about the way you have been dealt with during the study or any possible harm you might have suffered will be addressed. Please address your complaint to the person below, who is a senior University of Warwick official entirely independent of this study:

Head of Research Governance

Research & Impact Services

University House

University of Warwick

Coventry

CV4 8UW

Email: researchgovernance@warwick.ac.uk

Tel: 024 76 522733

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer, Information and Data Director who will investigate the matter: infocompliance@warwick.ac.uk

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data in a way that is not lawful you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Thank you for taking the time to read this Participant Information Leaflet

PRIVACY NOTICE

How we will ensure that we are using your personal data fairly and transparently in accordance with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

How we will use your personal data

If you agree to participate, we will ask you to confirm your name and email address. We will use the information you provide as a basis for analysis in order to develop the study’s findings.

The nature of your personal data that we will be using

The categories of personal data that we will ask for are:

· Name and contact email when completing the consent form.

· Your participation in managing technology training and/or business support, and your experiences of using the service;

· Personal data such as your job title and email address.

Why our use of your personal data is lawful

Under the GDPR, we are required to have a lawful basis for processing your personal data. For the purpose of this project, the lawful basis is that processing is necessary to perform a task in the public interest (e.g. providing unbiased research evidence in an article).

Who will have access to your personal data?

Access to your personal data will be restricted to members of the Warwick Institute for Employment Research (IER) project team for this research project. We will not report your name or anything that would make you personally identifiable in any outputs from the research and will use our best endeavours to ensure that data in any project outputs (e.g. reports and presentations) will not allow individuals or their organisations to be identified.

For the purposes of reporting, any identifying information will be removed to ensure confidentiality. Your interview data will be stored safely on a password-protected folder at the University of Warwick and will only be accessible by the research team. Contact details will not be stored in the same file as your interview data. The IER and its data storage procedures are fully compliant with GDPR. Aggregated research data will be made available (for example, in a published report or article) but they will not have access to any individual interview summaries, names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying details of participants. The collated research findings will be published in a research report and a journal article but none of your personal data will be included in the report.

Your right to withdraw consent

Participation in this study is entirely voluntary. Refusal to participate will not affect you in any way. If you do agree to participate, you may withdraw from the study at any time: there will not be any consequence of this. You have the right to withdraw from the study completely and decline any further contact by researchers after you withdraw. However, you will not be able to withdraw your responses (if they are used in any research reports) after the findings from the research have been published.

If you take part and inform us that you wish to withdraw from the research we will not use your response in the research and we will delete your responses.

How long we will keep your personal data?

We will retain your pseudonymised data for ten years in accordance with the University of Warwick retention requirements for research data. Your contact data will be deleted as soon as is practicable after the end of the project.

Your data protection rights

Under certain circumstances, you have the right:

· to ask us for access to information about you that we hold;

· to have your personal data rectified, if it is inaccurate or incomplete;

· to request the deletion or removal of personal data where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing;

· to restrict our processing of your personal data (i.e. permitting its storage but no further processing);

· to object to direct marketing (including profiling) and processing for the purposes of scientific/historical research and statistics;

· not to be subject to decisions based purely on automated decision-making.

If you need to contact us regarding any of the above, please email the University of Warwick’s Data Protection Officer at infocompliance@warwick.ac.uk. For further details see https://warwick.ac.uk/services/idc/dataprotection/datasubjectrights

Your right to complain

If you are unhappy with our use of your personal data, please let us know by contacting:

Head of Research Governance