Who is doing this evaluation?
The Department for Education (DfE): The Department for Education is responsible for children’s services and education, including early years, schools, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships, and wider skills in England.
IFF Research: IFF Research is an independent social research agency. DfE have commissioned IFF Research to design and conduct this evaluation.
For more information please visit the websites below:
What is this project about?
This project is an evaluation of the RISE Attendance and Behaviour Hubs Programme, which supports schools to improve pupil attendance and behaviour. The aim is to understand how the programme is working, what difference it is making for schools, staff and pupils, and how it could be improved in the future.
To do this, we will be:
- Asking school staff and pupils to take part in surveys about their experiences of the programme
- Speaking to a small number of Hub leads, school staff, pupils and parents/carers through interviews and group discussions;
- Looking at existing data, such as attendance and behaviour information, to see whether outcomes improve over time.
The findings will help the Department for Education understand how well the programme is working and how it can be developed in the future.
What personal information will IFF Research be processing?
If you are a school lead for Attendance and Behaviour Hubs, IFF may use your name, job role, school or organisation, and work contact details to manage your participation. This could include inviting you to take part in the evaluation baseline and endline surveys, and sending you information about the evaluation. If you agree to follow-up for qualitative research we may also contact you about that later in the project.
If you are a teacher at a school taking part in Attendance and Behaviour Hubs, you may be invited to take part in baseline and endline surveys via your school. IFF will not be using or collecting any of your personal details so these surveys will be anonymous. Later in the project, a small number of teachers may be invited to take part in qualitative research in schools which agree to take part in a case study.
IFF may also use school‑level attendance and behaviour data. Any information about pupils will be anonymised, and individuals will not be identified in reports.
All personal information will be kept secure and used only for research purposes.
What will happen to the information I give to IFF Research via the surveys or interviews I might take part in?
IFF Research will use the information for research purposes only. Responses from all individuals taking part in the evaluation will be reported in aggregate form, meaning your responses to questions are presented in a way that they will not directly identify you.
There may be scenarios where we are subject to a legal obligation to disclose or share your personal data, such as with law enforcement agencies, regulatory bodies or public authorities in order to prevent or detect crime. We will only ever disclose your personal data to these third parties to the extent we are required to do so by law.
Anonymised survey data will be securely shared with DfE for the purposes of evaluation and research to help improve attendance and behaviour in schools.
All data held by IFF will be retained for 3 months after the end of the evaluation, i.e. untilSeptember 2030, and then destroyed. By this we mean removed from all IFF digital systems held by any member of the evaluation team.
If you are a school lead and decide you do not want your data to be included in the research or you want to change any information given, you have one month from the point of research participation to inform the IFF evaluation team. For example, if you completed a survey in May 2026, you have until the end of June 2026 to inform IFF that you would like your data removed or changed.
Until the point data is anonymised, you also have the right to ask for access to your survey data. You can ask to withdraw your data or to see your data by contacting IFF Research at abhevaluation.contact@iffresearch.com.
If you completed the teachers survey, because it is fully anonymous we will not be able to provide you with access or withdraw your response as we cannot identify any individuals in the data.
Find out more information about IFF Research and its approach to data protection here.
More information about how DfE handles personal information is published here.
Do I have to take part in the surveys or interviews?
No, participation in this research is voluntary. Your responses will help the DfE evaluate the impact of the RISE Attendance and Behaviour Hubs programme.
How will IFF be using the survey data?
We will use survey data to understand how the Attendance and Behaviour Hubs programme is working and what difference it is making for schools, staff and pupils. Your anonymised responses will be combined with survey data from other people taking part in the programme to help us understand overall experiences and impacts.
Survey findings will be used alongside information from interviews and group discussions with a small number of participants to explore experiences in more detail. The findings will be used to produce evaluation reports and other outputs. These reports will not identify any individuals or schools and will help the Department for Education understand what works well and how the programme could be improved.
How will you protect the personal data?
We implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect data that we process from unauthorised disclosure, use, alteration or destruction. Data protection assessments are conducted for each research project and all recipients of data used within any research data.
Your information is securely stored on a restricted server, and access is controlled by our secure access policy for the duration of the research study period. This means that only named members of the IFF project team have access. We will always keep these under review to make sure that the measures we have implemented remain appropriate.
The data is only used for research. No data is used for automated decision-making.
Why our use of your personal data is lawful?
In order for our use of your personal data to be lawful, we need to meet one (or more) conditions in the data protection legislation. For the purpose of this project, the relevant condition(s) that we are meeting under Article 6 of the Data Protection Act 2018 in that this processing of personal information is carried out under our legitimate interests for research purposes as described in the “What is this project about” section above.
Special category personal data (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity) is being processed for research and statistical purposes in accordance with the conditions of the UK Data Protection Act 2018 Schedule 1 Part 1.
Your data protection rights
You have the right:
- to ask IFF for access to information that they hold about you
- 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 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 processing where it produces a legal or similarly significant effect on you
Further information about your data protection rights appears on the Information Commissioner’s website.
You have the right to raise any concerns with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) via their website.
Who can I contact for further information?
If you have any questions you can ask the IFF Research team by emailing abhevaluation.contact@iffresearch.com. Alternatively, you can email IFF’s Data Protection Officer (DPO) quoting ‘14117 ABH Evaluation’ at dpo@iffresearch.com.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner’s Office is the independent body who oversee the data protection legislation. They can be contacted at:
Information Commissioner’s Office,
Wycliffe House,
Water Lane,
Wilmslow,
Cheshire,
SK9 5AF
Changes to this privacy notice
We may update this notice (and any supplemental privacy notices), from time to time as shown below. We will notify you of the changes where required by applicable law to do so.
Last modified: 3 June 2026