COVID-19 Schools Infection Survey (SIS)

SIS was an in-school survey that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) carried out in 2020 and again in 2021.

This survey assessed the role of schools in coronavirus (COVID-19) transmission and how transmission within and from school settings could be minimised.

This survey closed on 31 March 2022.

What to do if you were invited to take part

If your school, child or children were selected to take part in the survey, you no longer need to respond.

Thank you to all those who volunteered to take part in 2020 and 2021.

We will keep all the information originally collected as part of the study securely in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. Any reports produced will not identify you, your child or anyone in your household.

We need to manage your information in specific ways for research to be reliable. This may mean that we won't be able to let you see or change the data we hold about you. We will keep all information about you safe and secure.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has the statutory objective to promote and safeguard the production of official statistics that serve the public good. The ONS will continue to hold your data collected from this study for as long as it remains useful for statistical research and production. In order for us to produce statistics we may link your data we obtain from this study to other survey and administrative data that we hold.

The ONS may provide access to de-identified data to accredited researchers for accredited research purposes via accredited processing environments, where it is lawful and ethical to do so. Access will only be provided to support valuable new research insights about UK society and the economy that are considered to be in the public good.

Further linkage to health data

The ONS and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) are working with the University of Bristol on a study called ELUCIDate (ELUCIDate long-term consequences of Childhood Infections using administrative research Data). This research will help inform how many children have health consequences of coronavirus (COVID-19) compared to other infections, how outcomes such as 'post-COVID syndrome' should be defined, and the risk factors for developing disease such as age and gender.

This study involves linking data for pupils who participated in SIS in the 2020 to 2022 academic year with data held by NHS England. More information about this study can be found on the study website. The original consent material provided as part of the SIS enrolment information outlined the intention to link SIS data to other data sources.

If however you wish to opt-out of the further linkage to health data held by NHS England for this study please contact us by 9 June 2023.

Email: Alison.Judd@ons.gov.uk
Phone: 020 8039 0326