Privacy notice

When you have a DfE (Department for Education) Identity account, DfE collects and processes some of your personal data.

DfE is the data controller for your information, as defined by data protection law.

DfE is referred to as ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ in this privacy policy.

What personal data we collect

When you create a DfE Identity account, we collect the following information about you:

  • name
  • email address
  • mobile phone number
  • date of birth
  • National Insurance number
  • initial teacher training (ITT) provider - where you gained qualified teacher status(QTS) or early years teacher status (EYTS).
  • teacher reference number (TRN)

How we use your personal data

We use your personal data to:

  • create and secure your account
  • let you access many DfE teaching services
  • let you update your personal information in one place with DfE
  • check if you’re registered in our database of educational professionals
  • add you to our database of educational professionals
  • help us inform government policy to improve education
  • improve the service - we may ask you to participate in user research

Who we share your data with

We need to share personal data for the purposes mentioned in ‘How we use your personal data’. We do so in compliance with UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the UK Data Protection Act 2018.

Customer service systems

We use Zendesk to manage and respond to your queries.

Visit the Zendesk website to find out how they use and look after your data (“service data”)(opens in new tab)

Hosting services

We host the DfE Identity account service on Microsoft Azure. Your data is encrypted to prevent it from being accessed by unauthorised people.

How long we keep your personal data for

We keep your personal data for as long as you use the service. We’ll keep it for no longer than 7 years after you stop using the service.

Your rights

Under the Data Protection Act 2018, you have the right to:

  • access personal data
  • be informed about how your data is being used
  • get and reuse your data for different services
  • have data erased
  • have incorrect data updated
  • object to how your data is processed in certain circumstances
  • stop or restrict the processing of your data

Get help

Contact the Department for Education if you want to ask us to remove your data or you want access to the data we have about you.

For further information, or to raise a concern, visit the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Changes to this privcy notice

We reserve the right to update this policy at any time.

We’ll provide you with a new policy if we make substantial changes.

We may also notify you in other ways about the processing of your personal information.