Equal opportunities

This section mainly covers characteristics that are protected in the Equality Act.

• For data relating to educational, social and economic backgrounds, please see the Contextual Admissions section

Data categories

To see the questions and categories we use for equal opportunities data, please download a Sample Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form (for information only):

• Please see the Equal Opportunities Data page if you want to download data sets

Your consent

Identified data that courses can use in their selection process

When you complete your application, you are asked in the Equal Opportunities section for your consent for the courses you have applied to to have full access to the information you give in that section. The information would not be anonymous and, if you give your consent, the courses would have access to it both during their selection process and afterwards.

As examples the courses could use the data:

• during their selection process for positive action;
• for audit, research and service enhancement;
• in reporting and publishing equality data as required by relevant public bodies for the purpose of ensuring equality of opportunity or treatment; etc.

The data would be available to the courses during this application cycle and in future years.

We expect that all courses will adhere to the requirements of both the Equality Act and Data Protection law in any use they make of the data.

• Please see the Courses section for information provided by individual courses about how they use the data provided by those applicants who give consent.

How we use the information you give

Data we make public

We use the information you give to produce national data for all applicants and successful applicants, and make it public on our website.  This reflects the wish of the clinical psychology training community to be open about the data and to make it available to applicants and to others who may find it useful e.g. for research.

This data is anonymised so no applicant is identified, and we also group together some categories with small numbers to maintain anonymity.

• Please see the Equal Opportunities Data page for files to download.

Anonymous data for courses

We use the information you give to produce national data for all applicants and successful applicants, and for all applications and short-listed applications.  We also produce data for each course for their applicants, their short-listed applicants and their successful applicants.  We send each course their set of data and the national set of data after selection is complete.

Courses may use this data:

• for audit, research and service enhancement;
• in reporting and publishing equality data as required by relevant public bodies for the purpose of ensuring equality of opportunity or treatment; etc.

All this data is anonymised so no applicant is identified.

Identified data for courses - Separated from selection

Courses are keen to ensure that their selection process does not involve any form of discrimination and that the successful group of applicants is representative of the general population.  However, certain groups are currently under-represented in the profession and it is not clear why.

The anonymised data described above allows courses to check if there is any discrepancy between the backgrounds of people applying and those they take into training. However, this is of limited use if they wish to check that their selection procedures are free from discrimination.

Once selection is complete, courses may conduct research or an audit, re-checking their procedures using batches of applications where the equal opportunities information is known to those working on the project but not to the people assessing the applications.

The data may be used in the year of entry, or in future years, to allow courses to conduct projects across more than one cohort.  

You may be worried that if you are unsuccessful and re-apply, courses will have information about you that they could use. Any research or audit will be subject to the usual approval process of the appropriate University and will be separate from selection, not only ensuring that selectors and those working on the project are different people but also removing identifying information from the data.

The suitability of any project will be considered by the Clearing House Board, including consideration of the criteria for separation from selection.