Transition to School Digital Statement Privacy Collection Statement
This Privacy Collection Statement is to advise staff at early childhood education and care services how the NSW Department of Education (the department) will collect your personal information when you use the Transition to School Digital Statement platform (platform). More information about the Transition to School Digital Statement (Statement) is available here.
Centre directors must ensure all centre staff who will use the platform are provided with this statement and agree to the enrolment process before they are enrolled to use the platform. Staff will be required to confirm this as part of the enrolment process.
Consent from a child’s parent/carer must also be obtained before creating a Statement for the child using the platform. The consent form is to be provided to parents and carers of children who will use the platform is available here.
Where to find more information
Personal information collected by the department will be used, disclosed or retained and secured in accordance with applicable NSW privacy laws. More information about how the department protects privacy is available at Privacy information and forms.
Any personal information the department collects will also be handled in accordance with the department’s Privacy Management Plan and Information Security Policy.
Should you wish to access, correct or make any changes to your personal information collected by the department, please contact EdConnect between the hours of 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, Monday to Friday on 1300 060 450.
Creating a Department of Education account - all platform users
In order to use the platform, you will require a department account. If you do not provide your personal information to create a department account then you will not be able to use the platform. The department will collect your personal information through the platform and will use this information to establish a department account for you.
If you are an educator working in a centre, the centre director (or a supervisor) will first need to submit your personal information to the department on your behalf, so that the department can use that information to contact you and verify the information. You need to let the centre director (or your supervisor) know if you do not agree to this.
To create an account, the department will collect your:
- legal name
- preferred first name (optional)
- personal email address
- mobile phone number (optional).
This personal information will be used by the department for the purposes of:
- checking there are no existing department accounts with the same personal information and to ensure a unique account can be established
- creating or updating a department account in your name
- sending you your department account login credentials and account management information, and
- sending instructions to allow you to reset your password, if required.
Your personal information may be accessed by authorised department employees for the purposes of establishing and managing your department account.
The personal information collected by the platform will be saved and stored in the department’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment and can be accessed by the department’s IT Directorate and project contractors engaged by the department.
Using the platform to verify a centre director's identity
A centre director registering to be the administrator of an early childhood education and care service on the platform will be required to undertake an additional identity verification check as part of the account creation process.
The additional identity verification check does not apply to early childhood education teachers or educators who are added to the platform by their centre director.
Centre directors verifying their identity will be asked to provide consent to this additional process. If you are a centre director, and you do not wish to undertake the additional identity verification, you will not be able to register the provider to use the platform. A supervisor may alternatively be nominated by a provider to complete this process.
Personal information collected as part of this additional process may include:
- legal name
- date of birth
- residential address
- government issued identifiers
- other information associated with government issued identifiers and/or other identity documents.
When centre directors enter personal information into the platform to verify their identity, the department will use a secure third-party system (GreenID) to send the information to the Document Verification Service Hub, managed by the Commonwealth Department of Home Affairs, for the purposes of confirming identity and returning a result to the department in real time.
Personal information entered by the centre director to verify identity is encrypted and protected in accordance with ISO27001 Information Security standards and specifications, both in transit and in storage. The department is committed to ensuring online systems that collect and transfer personal information meet cyber security and information security standards in accordance with the department’s Information Security Policy.
The department does not view, store or otherwise use this personal information provided as part of the additional identity verification process.
This additional personal information is not retained by GreenID, except that which is required for management of the department’s contract for GreenID, which may include legal name, date of birth and residential address, plus the date and time of the verification lookup. This information is stored by GreenID for up to one month in order to administer the contract with the department and will then be destroyed.
The Document Verification Service Hub, does not retrieve or store any personal information held by the relevant identity document issuer for the identity documents provided through this process.
Creating a Transition to School Digital Statement
Once you have completed the registration process, if you are creating a child’s Statement in the platform, your name (as you enter it on the Statement), will also be collected and be shared with the parent or carer of the child, and the school the child will be attending.
Your name is included on the Statement to identify who has written the child’s Statement and to enable parents, carers and the child’s school to contact you to obtain more information in relation to the child’s Statement. If you do not consent to your name being included in a child’s Statement, you can instead include a generic contact for the early childhood education and care service on the Statement.