Frequently asked questions

The educational ethics review process is intended for low-risk educational research projects that have a theoretically framed research question. Please see our ethics process map for guidance on which route is best suited for you.

No, it is not possible to obtain retrospective ethical approval. Even if there are no apparent ethical issues and the data has been collected in an appropriate way, giving retrospective ethical approval would be unethical.

No, you do not need to submit a new application. Please email the EERP team listing your amendments with your updated documents via email. It is important to consider how the change may affect different sections of your application, please ensure that these considerations have been made before sending it to the EERP Team. Once the EERP team have confirmed your further approval of amendments, you must upload your updated documents to your existing application on Sharepoint.

Education evaluation activities are commonly undertaken to understand how a module, programme, or teaching approach is working in practice. In many cases these activities are part of routine quality assurance or enhancement and do not require formal ethical approval.

However, ethical approval is required when an evaluation project is designed as educational research. A key indicator is whether the work is framed within existing theory or scholarship in education and designed to test or contribute to that body of knowledge.

When deciding whether ethical approval is needed, consider the purpose and framing of the project.

Ethical approval is likely to be required if:

• Is answering a research question
• The project is informed by educational theory or prior research.
• The evaluation is designed to test a specific hypothesis or theoretical explanation about teaching, learning, or student outcomes.
• The project is intended to generate findings that contribute to generalisable knowledge in education.
• The methods and analysis are structured in a way that systematically investigates a defined research question grounded in scholarship.
• You plan to publish in academic journals.

Ethical approval is usually not required if:

• You would like to explore the effectiveness of a teaching session or other one-off activities.
• The activity is conducted for internal evaluation or quality improvement purposes.
• The project focuses on describing or reviewing outcomes within a module or programme without testing a theory or research hypothesis.
• The work is primarily intended to inform local teaching practice or course development rather than contribute to educational research.
• You plan to share general outcomes of practise.

It is important to note that the intention to publish alone does not automatically mean ethical approval is required. Many evaluations that report on local teaching practice can be shared publicly without constituting educational research.

If, however, the evaluation is explicitly grounded in educational theory and designed to investigate or test that theory, it should be submitted for ethical review before the project begins.

If you are unsure whether your project constitutes evaluation or educational research, please contact the Education Ethics team for advice before submitting an application.

This would depend on the details of the planned research. If you are explicitly using Imperial as a case study, analysing and/or comparing institutional data then there may be institutional ‘risk’ and you will require ethical approval from Imperial and probably each institution involved in addition to the approval from the study’s ‘host institution’. However, if you are recruiting from Imperial staff or students but these participants will be integrated with other participants and there is no intention of, say, comparing Imperial with other institutions or analysing the data by institution, then contacting EERP to inform them of the study may be enough. If you are unclear please contact us to discuss the planned study.

It is not appropriate for an undergraduate student, particularly one without research qualifications or experience, to act as the Principal Investigator (PI) on an education research project. If this project is being conducted for academic credit (e.g., as part of a dissertation or module), it should be submitted by a qualified staff member of staff, usually the academic supervisor.