Privacy Notice

Privacy Notice for Further Education (FE) Workforce

This privacy notice explains how we collect and use your personal information for the FE Workforce Survey. The FE Workforce Survey service is run by the Department for Education (DfE).
For the purposes of relevant data protection legislation, the DfE is the data controller for personal information processed as part of the FE Workforce Survey.

How we use your personal information

The DfE is collecting your personal information through the FE Workforce Survey in order to build a more complete understanding of the implications of government policy reforms and their impact on the composition of FE staff. We do not use your personal data to make an automated decision or for automated profiling.

We collect and use personal information only where we need to and law permits
(for example):
• Your Name
• Your Date of Birth
• Your Gender
• Further Information About Your Employment In Further Education. We collect the following information from you to ensure that we are meeting our Public Sector Equality Duties and to inform local and national FE workforce planning.
• Your Ethnic Origin
• Information Relating to Your Health

How long we hold personal information

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

An individual’s personal information will be held for up to 66 years as we will require the data to have a long lifecycle to allow the assessment of trends and changes on a long term and ongoing basis, following which it will be securely destroyed.

Who we share your personal information with

We may share your information where the law allows it to enable the running of the FE Workforce collection and associated analysis, or where we have a legal obligation to do so.

We will not share or disclose your personal data to any party, not acting as a data processor on our behalf, outside of the DfE except for research purposes with academics and researchers under strict contractual obligations and in pseudonymised format.

What is the legal basis for collecting and processing the data

In order for the use of personal data to be lawful, we need to meet one (or more) conditions in the data protection legislation, as set out in Article 6(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

For the purposes of the FE Workforce Survey the relevant condition that we are meeting is ‘public task’ as specified under Article 6 (1)(e) of the GDPR, and special category data will be covered under Substantial Public interest based in law (Article 9(2)(g)) of GDPR legislation.

Furthermore, this collection is also covered under Section 54 of the Further and Higher Education Act (1992).

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have certain rights depending on our reason for processing your personal information.
• Your right of access: You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information. Read more here.
• To have your personal data rectified, if it is inaccurate or incomplete.
• To request the deletion or removal of personal data where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing.
• To restrict our processing of your personal data (i.e. permitting its storage but no further processing).

If you need to contact us regarding any of the above, please do so via the DfE site at: https://form.education.gov.uk/service/Contact_the_Department_for_Education

More information about how the DfE handles personal information is published here

Further information about your data protection rights appears on the Information
Commissioner’s website at:
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/principle-6-rights/

How to Complain

Contact us using our secure online contact form or by writing to:

Ministerial and Public Communications Division
Department for Education
Piccadilly Gate
Store Street
Manchester
M1 2WD

If you wish to contact the DfE’s data protection officer, please use the secure online form or write to the address above.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint about data protection with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) . For more information, visit the ICO website.

Original Date of privacy notice 6/7/2021
Last Updated 10/04/2025