Thousands of teachers' details lost

General Teaching Council mislays CD

29 September 2008 11:03 GMT / By Katie Scott

Another week and another data scandal.

The General Teaching Council for England has had to own up to losing a disc with it says contain the personal details of 11,420 teachers in the UK.

The disc went missing whilst in transit.

The GTC has issued an apology to teachers and also stated that it has upped the security on records in its Teaching Register.

The data that has been lost comprises electronic copies of registration update forms recently submitted by 11,423 teachers.

Each form includes a name, address and teacher reference number, but does not contain National Insurance numbers or financial data.

The GTC says that the disc containing this information was being sent by the GTC's contracted data processor to the GTC's office in Birmingham.

In a statement, the council said: "The GTC is treating this matter with the utmost seriousness. The disc was sent via a recognised courier using its full tracking service, but did not arrive at the GTC when expected. An extensive search of the courier's vehicles and premises has not yet resulted in the disc being found".

It continued that the disc was encrypted, "so not readily usable by a third party and all the evidence available to us suggests that it is still mislaid within the courier system".

GTC registrar Alan Meyrick said, "We have taken all possible steps to protect the integrity of the Teaching Register and are working to ensure that there will be no similar incident in the future".

"Because we recognise that no encryption system can ever be entirely infallible, we have taken urgent steps to put additional security measures in place for affected records. We have written to teachers affected to apologise, and to assure them that steps have been taken to prevent records being accessed or misused in any way."