We are Wales’ largest regulator, we have a legal obligation to hold and maintain the Register of education practitioners. It includes teachers and learning support staff in school and further education settings, qualified youth/youth support workers and work-based learning practitioners.
We process your personal information so that we can provide services for you, carry out public functions (public task), and comply with applicable laws and regulations (legal obligation). Please see below the different tasks performed by the Qualification and Registration team and how this applies to your personal data and privacy.
Where we obtain your information
Directly from you
- Application for registration;
- Throughout your communication with us, including through the use of the MyEWC service.
From others
- From initial teacher training institutions if you are undertaking a course or programme leading to the award of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in Wales;
- From employers, pensions agencies, other education regulators, awarding bodies and public bodies.
What personal information we collect
We have a legal obligation to hold and maintain the Register, and we therefore need to hold information about education practitioners and employers. Personal details held on the Register include practitioners’ name, contact details, employment, qualifications and professional development details. More information is available in schedule 2 of the The Education Workforce Council (Main Functions) (Wales) Regulations 2015.
The EWC has a responsibility to record those awarded Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in Wales each year, and we therefore need information about the relevant practitioners, including personal data such as their name and contact details and information about their qualification(s). Practitioners who gain QTS in Wales will be allocated a Teacher Reference Number (TRN).
We hold data about persons that are barred from regulated activity relating to children or vulnerable adults, who are subject to a disciplinary order or who are disqualified from registration with the EWC or equivalent bodies. This data is held to ensure that we comply with Section 10 (3) of the Education (Wales) Act 2014.
We record some special category data, such as information about ethnicity and national identity. This data is processed according to article 9(2)(g) of the UK GDPR.
In order to maintain the Register, we require registrants and other relevant parties, such as employers, to advise us about missing or incorrect data. Relevant employers are required under section 36 of the Education (Wales) Act 2014 to inform the EWC about the registered persons they employ. If you believe that any information we hold about you is incorrect, please log in to your MyEWC account, or contact the registration team on 029 2046 0099 or
How we use your information
We need to gather and maintain data about education practitioners in order to fulfil our legal obligation to maintain the Register of education practitioners.
In order to ensure that practitioners are suitable for registration (as per Section 10 of the Education (Wales) Act 2014), we need information that will allow us to undertake suitability checks.
The principal aims of the EWC as outlined in the Education (Wales) Act 2014 are as follows:
- to contribute to improving the standards of teaching and the quality of learning in Wales;
- maintain and improve standards of professional conduct amongst teachers and persons who support teaching and learning in Wales.
In order to ensure that we fulfil these aims, we need to ensure that we hold adequate, accurate data about education practitioners. The information we hold on the Register enables us to perform our regulatory function. We may use your contact details in order to contact you about matters related to your registration.
Some of your personal details may be shared with selected third parties, such as the Disclosure & Barring Service and education or teaching councils. We will only disclose your information to third parties for legitimate purposes about which you have been informed unless we are required to do otherwise for legal reasons.
If you choose to carry on your profession elsewhere, we may be approached by a professional regulator and/or other competent authority outside of the United Kingdom to validate the information that you provide to them.
Some of your details will be available to your employer(s). The main purpose of this is so they can verify your registration status and help to ensure that your information is correct and up to date.
A sub-set of the data from the Register (forename, surname, employer, registration category and any disciplinary orders) is publicly available. This is according to section 13 (2) (i) of the Education (Wales) Act 2014. We are not responsible for how the publically accessible information is used by those who access it.
The data that we hold on the Register of education practitioners may be shared with other teams within the EWC for purposes that are outlined in their respective sections of the Privacy Notice. The EWC regularly produce statistical and research reports which summarises key information from the Register. This information to feed into workforce planning and to inform policy development.
The Register was developed and is maintained by a third party provider, Miller Technology. For more information, please see MillerTech’s privacy policy: http://www.millertech.co.uk/privacy-policy. Redstor are used as a data management platform to store an encrypted copy of our data. Their privacy policy is available at https://www.redstor.com/privacypolicy. We may use external mailing companies in order to send letters in bulk. These external companies are required to destroy or return the personal details the EWC has provided them with upon completion of the task.
Why our use of your personal data is lawful
The Education (Wales) Act 2014 (and any subsequent amendments) and associated regulations and legislation, sets out our functions and the information we may hold. We process your personal information so that we can provide services for you, carry out public functions (public task), and comply with applicable laws and regulations (legal obligation).
We have a legal obligation to hold and maintain the Register of education practitioners, and our main legal basis for processing this data is therefore article 6(1)(c) of the UK GDPR (Legal obligation). For some data processing, we rely on article 6(1)(e) of the UK GDPR (Public task), which allows us to process personal data when this is necessary to perform our public tasks as a regulator.
If the information you provide us contains special category data, such as health, religious or ethnic information or information related to Fitness to Practise, the legal basis we rely on to process it is article 9(2)(g) of the UK GDPR, which also relates to our public task and the safeguarding of your fundamental rights. We also rely on Schedule 1 part 2(6) of the DPA2018 which relates to statutory and government purposes and Schedule 8 part 1 and 6 which relates to conditions for sensitive processing.