Applying for ethical approval

FET/ACE

FET/ACE ethics online form (access permission needed)

The online ethics form is available to staff and doctoral students in the Faculty of Environment and Technology and, from February 2023, this will now include the School of Engineering; School of Computing and Creative Technologies; and School of Art, Design, Culture and Media to align with the new College of Arts, Technology and Environment (CATE).

Postgraduate research (PGR) students who do not have a UWE Bristol staff email account will need to request access to the system by contacting the Research Ethics Admin Team (researchethics@uwe.ac.uk). 

FBL, HAS and Professional Services 

All staff and doctoral students in the Faculty of Business and Law (FBL); the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences (HAS); and Professional Services, should continue to use the current process linked below.

Supervisors will need to complete application for taught programme students.

All undergraduate and postgraduate taught students whose research has been assessed as high risk by their Supervisor should also use the process and download and complete the ethics application form (DOCX), in conjunction with their supervisor and on completion send to researchethics@uwe.ac.uk.   

Please note: All Faculty Research Ethics Committees will continue to meet and remain monitor their ethics applications separately until such time as the new ethics committee structure is finalised. This will enable all our systems, processes, communications, and ways of working to be aligned by the 2023-24 academic year. 

• Application for ethical approval form (DOC)
• Amendment form (DOC)

You are required to provide the following details:

• Research proposal or project design
• Participant information sheet and consent form (if more than one for different aspects of the project, you need to include them all)
• All staff and students must provide a UWE Bristol privacy notice
• Undergraduate and M-level students should follow the Policies, procedures and guidance
• Questionnaire/survey
• External ethics approval and any supporting documentation (if appropriate)

You must allow six weeks for your application to be processed. Please note, over the summer and the Christmas and Easter vacations, your application may take up to eight weeks when scrutineers are not available to review applications.

Applications are logged by the Research Ethics Administrative team, and sent out to members of the Ethics Committees for scrutiny. Scrutineers use a checklist, Scrutineer's Review Form (PDF), to ensure that applicants have addressed the necessary points in their applications. Comments are collated and then passed to the Ethics Committee Chairs to make a decision on approval. Often further work or clarification is needed before full approval can be given (make sure you factor this into your timetable).

You cannot start collecting data until you have full ethical approval for that activity.

Potential outcomes of an ethics application are:

• full approval
• approval with conditions
• revise and resubmit
• not approved.

You will be given feedback to help you to make your application better. It is very unusual for an application to be ‘not approved’.

Once you have ethical approval:

• make sure that what you do is only what you have been given approval to do
• if you haven't got consent from your participants to share your data or use in ways not specified in your consent form, you can't do it!

• Templates for participant information sheets, consent forms and a privacy notice for staff and postgraduate research (PGR) students are available on Policies, procedures and guidance. These are GDPR compliant and should be used.
• Undergraduate and postgraduate taught (Masters) students should refer to the Policies, procedures and guidance.
• All staff and postgraduate research (PGR) students undertaking research should refer to the Policies, procedures and guidance for general GDPR guidance.
• Participant information sheets, consent forms and other relevant documentation must include the UWE Bristol logo (see UWE Bristol logo usage standards (PDF)).

If your research project involves NHS patients, service users, organs, tissue, data or other bodily material, or is to be conducted on NHS property, please refer to our Health and Social Care research page.

If you have ethical approval from another external research ethics committee, for example from another Higher Education Institution, you will need to email this to your FREC or to RESC for ratification at researchethics@uwe.ac.uk.

If things change, you need to let the Committee know, and may need to apply for further approval, for example changes to participant groups, protocols, or extensions. You can do this by completing an amendment form (DOC). This can generally be processed quite quickly.

If you need an urgent decision on your application, a special request for exceptional approval can be made by contacting the Research Ethics Administrative team at researchethics@uwe.ac.uk, tel: +44 (0)117 32 81167. This option is only available to staff and not to undergraduate, postgraduate taught or postgraduate research students, and cannot be used to support a retrospective ethical approval.

If a project has multiple methods of data collection that do not require fast approval, then the researcher should request urgent processing only for the relevant part.

The researcher must accept that there are no guarantees that an urgent decision can be made by their deadline. It is dependent on the capacity of others.

If the application is of poor quality, then it will cease to be treated as urgent. 

The RESC/FREC reserves the right to delay processing urgent applications if the necessary administrative and scrutiny resources are not available to reach a decision with the urgency requested.