Who we are and why we process personal data
We are Teacher Continuing Professional Development (CPD), within the Department for Education (DfE).
The Early Career Framework (ECF) is an initiative funded by CPD.
Mentions of “us” and “we” means CPD and “you” means anyone using this service.
How we look after your personal data
Any information we collect when you use our services will be used and looked after by:
- the Department for Education
- the teacher training providers the candidate applies to
This means we’re joint data controllers, as well as data processors, for your information (defined by data protection law).
The Support for Early Career Teachers Service is a new DfE service. We’re confident that it has met our security standards, but we’ll continue to run security tests as we improve the service.
Why our use of your personal data is lawful
In order for our use of your personal data to be lawful, we need to meet one, or more, conditions in the data protection legislation.
DfE processes your data under the basis of Public Task (Article 6(1)(e) of GDPR). In this case, it is necessary for the department to carry out this work, and to use the information for these purposes, to exercise its functions.
What personal data we collect
If you’re a candidate using the Support for Early Career Teachers Service we will collect the following information about you:
- your preferred name
- your email address
How we use your data
Tracking progress through self-study materials
Tracking progress through self-study materials includes the following:
- identify which self-study materials are relevant to you
- identifying which self-study materials have been accessed
- getting in touch if there’s a security issue concerning your data
- getting in touch with candidates and schools about progress through self-study materials
- getting in touch with candidates and school about self-study materials
- match, link and analyse your data along with other datasets
Building better support for Early Career Teachers and ECF Inductions
We’ll use your data to help us build better processes. For example, we’ll look at any feedback you give us about our services so we can improve them.
We may contact you to carry out user research.
Getting insight to make government policy better
We might match, link and analyse your data along with other datasets to help us inform government policy around teacher recruitment and retention.
Quality assuring, evaluating and monitoring the policy
We might match, link and analyse your data along with other datasets to share with auditors, evaluators and relevant bodies in order to carry out appropriate quality assurance, evaluation and monitoring of ECF inductions.
Auditors, evaluators and relevant bodies may contact you in the future to ask you to participate in evaluation activities relating to your ECF induction. You will have the opportunity to opt out of this stage of the process if and when you are contacted.
Who we share your data with
We need to share personal data for the purposes mentioned above.
We do so under section 132 of the Education Act 2002, together with regulation 5 of the Education (School Teachers Qualifications) (England) Regulations 2003.
External organisations who process data
Customer service systems
We use a customer service management system to process some personal data, such as feedback you send us.
Zendesk is currently our preferred customer service management system because it uses various safeguards to look after your data.
We’ll ask if you agree to cookies so that we can get statistics from Google Analytics. If you consent, Google may be able to get your IP address. We use Google Analytics for statistics and will not identify you personally from these.
We also use Google’s G Suite to process some personal data. Google processes your data according to our instructions.
Hosting services
We host our services on GOV.UK PaaS, which encrypts your data to prevent it being accessed by unauthorised people.
Auditors
We use external auditors to quality assure the schools offering induction to ensure that you are receiving the appropriate standard of statutory induction.
Evaluators
We use external evaluators to understand the effectiveness of the ECF-based training you are receiving from schools offering induction, and the impact it is having on the teacher workforce.
Your rights
Under the Data Protection Act 2018, you have the right to find out what data we have about you. This includes the right to:
- be informed about how your data is being used
- access personal data
- have incorrect data updated
- have data erased
- stop or restrict the processing of your data
- get and reuse your data for different services
- object to how your data is processed in certain circumstances
You can find out more about how we handle personal data in our personal information charter.
Getting help and raising a concern
If you want to ask us to remove your data or get access to the data we have about you, you can email us on:
continuing-professional-development@digital.education.gov.uk
You can also use our contact form to get in touch with our Data Protection Officer.
Once an early career teacher has enrolled with a teacher training provider, we will not be able to ask them to remove personal data from their systems. Please contact the provider separately.
For further information or to raise a concern, visit the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Keeping our privacy policy up to date
We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We will also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.