SQE2 pilot privacy notice

12 August 2019

In the application form, we will ask you to provide some personal information.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is the "data controller" of this personal information for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (the GDPR) (which applies across the EU including the UK) and the UK Data Protection Act 2018 which supplements GDPR and extends its application in the UK.

Kaplan Financial Limited (Kaplan) will collect and process your personal data submitted in connection with this application. We have a contract for services in place with Kaplan to operate the SQE, including this pilot, which includes suitable provisions to ensure Kaplan processes personal data in accordance with our requirements and those prescribed by the GDPR. Kaplan uses third party service providers to assist in the operation of the pilot. These service providers will process your personal data to the extent necessary for the operation of the pilot and in doing so they are also required to comply with our requirements and those prescribed by law.

We will use the personal information collected in this form to process your application for the SQE2 pilot and to make a decision about the application itself. We do this on the basis it is necessary for exercising our official authority as the regulatory body for solicitors and applicants to this profession.

We will collect certain information about age, disability, ethnicity, sex orientation, gender, religion and socio-economic background. This information is treated with strict confidence. We will use the data to monitor the equality impact of the assessment to ensure that it complies with the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty including evaluating different statistical approaches to detecting bias. We may also prepare and publish or share statistics or research obtained from this data but not in a form that identifies anyone.

We will also collect information about any disabilities you may have in order to make any reasonable adjustments for you. We collect and use this information in order to comply with our duties with equality legislation including the Equality Act 2010.

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

Please see the SRA's full privacy notice at sra.org.uk/privacy full details of how we process and store personal information. This notice includes details on how you can contact us with queries relating to your personal data and exercise your rights in connection with our processing of your personal data.