Privacy notice for the Apply to become an academy service

The Department for Education (DfE) owns the Apply to become an academy service and is the data controller (external website) for it.

This notice explains why we use your personal information and how.

What data we collect

We ask for details of establishment members involved in the conversion, including:

• school headteacher details including their name and email address
• governing body details including the name of the chair and email address
• where a new trust is being created, details of their role, their date of birth and a description of them

We also use the DfE Sign-in service to capture the name, role and email address of the application’s author.

Why we use it

We capture this data so that we can:

• consider a school's application to become an academy
• coordinate teams involved in the conversion process
• contact you about your application
• invite people to take part in user research
• get feedback on the service

Who we share your data with

We sometimes need to make the information we collect from you available to our partners.

These include:

• The Education and Skills Funding Agency
• advisory board members

We also:

• share data with third parties, such as contracted developers
• capture anonymised Google Analytics data

We may share your information with the police or other authorities if required by law.

How long we keep your data

We will hold any personal data we capture for 2 years.

This includes:

• the names of people who have contributed to the application
• their email address

We will hold some other information indefinitely for our records.

This includes information about:

• the converting school and how it operates
• the trust
• the conversion process

Our legal basis for processing your data

The law says that we can use the data you provide to:

• in the exercise of our functions as a government department
• perform a task in the public interest

Your rights

By law you are entitled to:

• ask to see a copy of any information we hold about you - this is called a Subject Access Request (SAR)
• ask us to correct mistakes in your data
• ask us to stop processing it
• ask us to delete it

If you ask us to delete or stop processing data from an ongoing application, we may not be able to continue with it.

You may also want to:

• read DfE’s Personal Information Charter for more information on the data it holds, and how to make an SAR
• visit the Information Commissioner’s Office website (external website) to learn more about your rights

Contact us or make a complaint

If you have any questions about the way we use your data, or if you want to make a complaint, you can:

• use the DfE contact form, or
• write to our Data Protection Officer (DPO) at

Data Protection Officer
Department for Education (B2.28)
7 & 8 Wellington Place
Wellington Street
Leeds
LS1 4AW

Changes to this policy

We recommend that you come back to this page from time to time as we sometimes need to update this information.

Last updated 3 October 2022