Notice

Privacy notice: international teacher recruitment programmes (candidates)

Updated 24 February 2021

To comply with data protection laws, DfE is the data controller for personal data processed as part of our international teacher recruitment programmes:

Personal data we will use

The personal data DfE and our contracted partners will use for this project are:

  • name
  • date of birth
  • email address
  • telephone number
  • Skype contact
  • qualified teacher status (QTS) reference number
  • teacher reference number (TRN)

For SVTP only, we will also use:

  • Spanish national ID number (DNI)
  • home address
  • Skype contact
  • name of partner or spouse if they’re also applying for the programme

How we use your information

We receive personal data from:

  • you directly
  • contracted partners
  • Spain’s Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MEFP) (SVTP only)

We use your personal data to:

  • assess your suitability for the programmes
  • provide you with suitable teacher recruitment opportunities in maintained schools and academies in England

If you are placed through one of our programmes, DfE and our contracted partners will also stay in regular contact with you to:

  • support your recruitment and acclimatisation
  • monitor your placement

We may ask for or receive feedback from your hiring school about your suitability and performance during, and after you complete, your placement on the programme. This will help us determine the effectiveness of certain aspects of the programmes, such as the recruitment process, acclimatisation service and continuing professional development (CPD) offer. It will also help us to improve the programmes.

More information is available from our recruitment agencies on how they use the data collected directly from you for SVTP and the International Teacher Recruitment Programme.

DfE and our contracted partners may share your personal data with:

  • recruitment agencies
  • schools that may wish to consider you for a vacancy
  • members of the interview panel to assess your suitability for the programme (SVTP only)

We sometimes make personal data available to other organisations, such as companies carrying out evaluations or research on our behalf. In these cases, we ensure this complies with data protection legislation.

Requesting feedback

DfE and our contracted partners may also contact you to request feedback on:

  • your experience of the programme
  • your experience after completing or leaving the programme

This will help us determine the effectiveness of the programmes and identify future improvements.

We may use your feedback in marketing materials for our international teacher recruitment programmes. We will request your consent for this.

DfE and our contracted partners may also use your personal data to carry out:

  • research about teacher recruitment
  • evaluation work on our international teacher recruitment programmes

This may involve us contacting you for your views and experiences.

Lawful use of your personal data

For our processing to be lawful, we are relying on the following laws:

  • article 6(1)(e) of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) - ‘the processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller’
  • schedule 10(7)(d) of the Data Protection Act 2018
  • section 10 of the Education Act 1996

Who we will make your personal data available to

If you are placed through one of our programmes, we will need to make personal data available to other organisations. These might include contracted partners who we have employed to process your personal data on our behalf, or other organisations with whom we need to share your personal data for specific purposes.

If we need to share your personal data with others, we will ensure this data sharing complies with data protection legislation.

For the purpose of our programmes, we have contracted with Point to Point Education, Randstad Education, Prospero Teaching and Quantum Scholars to process your personal data on our behalf.

This means they will be using your personal data to support your recruitment and acclimatisation and to monitor your placement. Your personal data will not be shared with all of these companies and will depend on which programme you are placed in and which recruitment agency has placed you.

Transferring data outside EEA

As some of our contracted partners are located outside the EEA, we may need to transfer your personal data outside the EEA.

When we transfer data to contracted partners outside the EEA, we have procedures in place to do so securely.

Keeping your personal data

We will only keep your personal data for as long as we need it for this piece of work.

We will securely destroy your personal data after 5 years, in line with GDPR storage restrictions.

Beyond 5 years, we may retain statistics or reports based on the data you provided, and we may share these with other teams in DfE.

Under article 5(1)(e) of the GDPR, and in compliance with the relevant conditions, we can keep personal data processed for research purposes indefinitely.

These statistics or reports will not contain personal data and will not identify you or your school.

Your data protection rights

You have the right:

  • to ask us for access to information about you that we hold
  • to have your personal data corrected, if it is inaccurate or incomplete
  • to ask us to delete or remove personal data if there is no compelling reason for its continued processing
  • to restrict our processing of your personal data, for example allowing its storage but no further processing
  • to object to direct marketing, including profiling and processing for the purposes of scientific or historical research and statistics
  • not to be subject to decisions based on automated processing if it produces a legal or similarly significant effect on you

Your right to make a complaint

You have the right to raise concerns with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you have questions about how your personal data will be used, or have any queries about the programme, contact international.teacherrecruitment@education.gov.uk. In the title of your message, enter your full name and ‘personal data’ as a reference.

For general queries about how DfE handles data, contact the Data Protection Officer (DPO).