REF individual staff circumstances forms

The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Team is part of the University of Leicester. The University of Leicester is the Data Controller for your information.

This privacy notice explains how we use your personal information and your rights regarding that information.

What information are you collecting?

The information includes:

• contact details;
• disability;
• ill health or injury;
• mental health condition;
• constraints relating to family leave that fall outside of standard allowance;
• caring responsibilities;
• gender reassignment;
• any other exceptional reasons e.g. bereavement.

Why are you collecting my data?

The purpose of collecting this information is threefold:

• To enable staff who have not been able to produce a REF-eligible output during the assessment period to be entered into REF where they have:
  • circumstances that have resulted in an overall period of 46 months or more absence from research during the assessment period, due to equality-related circumstances (see below)
  • circumstances equivalent to 46 months or more absence from research due to equality-related circumstances
  • two or more qualifying periods of family-related leave.
• To recognise the effect that equality-related circumstances can have on an individual’s ability to research productively, and to adjust expectations in terms of expected workload / production of research outputs.
• To establish whether there are any Units of Assessment where the proportion of declared circumstances is sufficiently high to warrant a request to the higher education funding bodies for a reduced required number of outputs to be submitted.

How will you use this data?

Completed forms will be returned to the dedicated REF Individual Circumstances email address: REFCircs@leicester.ac.uk, which is only accessible to members of the University’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Team. Submitted data will be kept confidential to the REF team, the REF Equality and Diversity Advisory Panel, and main panel chairs. All these bodies are subject to confidentiality arrangements. The REF team will destroy the submitted data about individuals’ circumstances on completion of the assessment phase.

Additional support will be available as required and any individuals wishing to request a confidential meeting with a member of the EDI Team will be able to request this through the email address above.  If the institution decides to apply to the funding bodies for either form of reduction of outputs (removal of ‘minimum of one’ requirement or unit circumstances), we will need to provide UKRI (UK) with data that you have disclosed about your individual circumstances, to show that the criteria have been met for reducing the number of outputs.

What is the legal basis for processing the data?

The University of Leicester is processing your personal data under the lawful basis of a task carried out in the public interest.

Where special category data is provided by the data subject, the University of Leicester is processing this data as it is necessary for the purposes of carrying out the University’s obligations and exercising the rights of the University and of the data subject under the contract of employment.

If you are sharing my data with others, who are you sharing it with?

If the institution decides to apply to the funding bodies for either form of reduction of outputs (removal of ‘minimum of one’ requirement or unit circumstances), we will need to provide UKRI (UK) with data disclosed about individual circumstances, to show that the criteria have been met for reducing the number of outputs.

How long will you process my data for?

This data will be held until December 2021, following the end of the REF assessment and audit phase.

What are my rights and how do I enforce them?

• Right to be informed
• Right of access
• Right of rectification
• Right to restrict processing
• Right to object

How do I complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office?

The Information Commissioner can be contacted on:

• Information Commissioners Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK95AF
• 0303 123 1113
• ICO website