PACE PARENT RESEARCH PRIVACY NOTICE
For “What SEND Parents Wish They’d Known Earlier: Secondary School” and related PACE parent research
Last updated: 13 September 2026
About this notice
PACE Project UK is gathering parent and carer experiences to understand what families wish they had known earlier about SEND and secondary school.
This notice explains what information the questionnaire collects, why we collect it and how responses may be used.
Participation is voluntary.
For more information about PACE’s wider use of personal information, please also see the PACE Project UK Privacy Policy.
1. Who is responsible for the research information?
The controller is:
Ruth Garner, trading as PACE Project UK
Website: paceprojectuk.org
Email: ruth@paceprojectuk.org
2. What the questionnaire collects
The main questionnaire is deliberately designed not to ask for direct identifiers such as:
- your name;
- your email address;
- your home address;
- your child’s name;
- your child’s school;
- teacher or SENCO names;
- professional names; or
- local-authority staff names.
It may ask for broad information including:
- whether you are a parent or carer;
- your child’s broad age or educational stage;
- broad geographic area;
- type of educational setting;
- SEND support status, such as SEN Support or an EHCP;
- broad areas of need;
- experiences of secondary-school transition;
- support and reasonable adjustments;
- attendance or EBSA;
- communication with school;
- meetings and EHCPs;
- behaviour and sanctions;
- assessments;
- record keeping and evidence;
- what helped;
- what was difficult; and
- what you wish you had known earlier.
Free-text questions allow you to describe your experience in your own words.
3. Please do not identify your child or other people
Please do not include:
- your child’s name;
- school names;
- teacher or SENCO names;
- local-authority staff names;
- professional names;
- names of other children or families;
- addresses;
- full postcodes; or
- other details that could clearly identify someone.
This is particularly important because SEND and some health-related information can be special-category personal data.
The ICO confirms that health information is special-category data and receives additional protection under UK GDPR.
4. What happens if identifying information is included accidentally?
Although the questionnaire is designed to avoid direct identification, a participant may accidentally include identifying information in a free-text answer.
PACE will not intentionally publish this information.
Where identifying information is noticed, PACE will remove, redact or generalise it before using the response in public findings, quotations, guides or resources.
Where unnecessary identifiable information has been provided, PACE may delete or redact that information rather than retain it.
This is why I prefer this wording to describing every raw questionnaire response as “anonymous” from the moment it is submitted.
5. Why PACE is collecting the information
PACE is collecting parent experiences to:
- understand recurring experiences and themes;
- identify what parents wish they had known earlier;
- understand what families found helpful;
- understand common information gaps;
- create practical parent-led resources;
- create guides and summaries;
- publish anonymised research findings;
- improve PACE information;
- identify areas that may benefit from further parent research; and
- help families coming behind those who have already navigated secondary school and SEND.
6. How questionnaire responses may be used
Responses may contribute to:
- PACE parent guides;
- early-findings summaries;
- website articles and resources;
- research summaries or reports;
- anonymised statistics;
- social-media content;
- presentations;
- awareness materials; and
- future PACE parent-insight work relating to the research.
PACE may publish short quotations or examples from responses only after checking them for identifying information.
Quotes may be lightly edited where necessary to remove identifying details or protect privacy without changing their meaning.
PACE will not use questionnaire responses to publicly name, rate, review or criticise individual children, parents, schools, councils, teachers, SENCOs, professionals or local-authority staff.
7. Participation is voluntary
Taking part is entirely voluntary.
You can:
- decide not to participate;
- stop before submitting;
- skip optional questions; and
- share as much or as little as you feel comfortable sharing.
Choosing not to participate will not affect your ability to use the PACE website or Opportunity Finders.
8. Lawful basis and sensitive information
PACE needs a lawful basis under UK GDPR when questionnaire information constitutes personal data.
PACE uses consent where participants voluntarily submit identifiable personal information for the stated research purposes.
Questionnaire responses may also contain information relating to disability, physical or mental health. Where this constitutes identifiable special-category personal data and PACE relies on consent to process it, the additional Article 9 condition is explicit consent.
The ICO states that special-category processing requires both an Article 6 lawful basis and an Article 9 condition, and that explicit consent must be expressly confirmed rather than inferred.
Important: PACE’s preferred approach is not to collect identifiable special-category information about children in the first place. Participants are therefore specifically asked not to identify their child or other individuals.
Once information has been genuinely anonymised so that an individual is no longer reasonably identifiable, it is no longer treated as identifiable personal information for these purposes.
9. Consent before taking part
Before submitting research containing personal or sensitive information, participants should be given clear information about the research and asked to actively confirm their agreement.
Where explicit consent is being relied upon for special-category personal data, the consent statement should specifically refer to the sensitive information involved and the purposes for which it will be used.
This means we should check the actual consent question at the beginning of your Google Form next. Merely having a Privacy Policy link is not enough to turn ordinary consent into explicit consent; the ICO says explicit consent needs an express statement.
10. Optional contact information
If PACE separately invites participants to:
- receive updates;
- participate in follow-up research; or
- be contacted about their experience,
providing contact details should be optional.
Where possible, these details will be collected separately from the main questionnaire response.
Providing an email address for research follow-up does not automatically sign you up for general PACE email marketing or newsletters.
Newsletter consent should be requested separately.
11. Withdrawal and deletion
You can withdraw before submitting the questionnaire simply by closing it without submitting your response.
After submission, PACE may be unable to locate a particular response if it contains no name, email address or other identifier linking it to you.
This means that although you can withdraw consent for future processing of identifiable information, it may not be possible to identify and delete a particular non-identifiable questionnaire response after submission.
If you have separately supplied contact details, you can ask PACE to delete those details by contacting:
12. How long research information is kept
Identifiable or potentially identifiable raw questionnaire information will not be retained longer than reasonably necessary.
PACE currently intends to retain questionnaire responses for up to three years after the relevant research questionnaire closes, unless they have been fully anonymised earlier.
Identifying information accidentally included in responses may be removed sooner when identified.
Fully anonymised themes, statistics, summaries and research findings may be retained for longer because they no longer identify individual participants.
Keep the three-year period only if you genuinely intend to operate that deletion schedule. The ICO requires organisations to tell people their retention periods, so it needs to be a real policy rather than boilerplate.
13. Where questionnaire information is stored
PACE currently uses online services that may include:
- Google Forms;
- Google Sheets; and
- Google Drive.
Access to raw research responses is limited to those who need it for PACE research and administration.
PACE takes reasonable measures to protect accounts and research information, including password protection and restricting access.
14. International processing
Some technology providers used for PACE research may store or process information outside the UK.
Where this results in a restricted international transfer of personal information, applicable UK transfer requirements will be followed, including relevant adequacy arrangements or appropriate safeguards where required.
Further information can be requested from:
15. Your rights
Where PACE holds identifiable personal information about you, depending on the circumstances you may have rights including:
- access;
- correction;
- erasure;
- restriction;
- objection;
- data portability in certain circumstances; and
- withdrawal of consent where consent is relied upon.
These rights may not be capable of being exercised against information that PACE genuinely cannot link back to you.
Contact:
16. Complaints
If you have concerns about the use of your information, please contact PACE first at:
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Information Commissioner’s Office
17. Changes to this notice
PACE may update this research privacy notice as the project or research develops.
The latest version will be available on the PACE website.