Estonian ministry: schools must tell teachers about automatic checks of their data

Estonia's Ministry of Education and Research has confirmed that schools need to inform teachers about automatic checks carried out by the national education information system, EHIS. The issue arose after the newspaper Tartu Postimees reported that the system queries the penal register for data on teachers every ten days. Many teachers said they had not known about these queries.

How the check works

Mirjam Reintal, legal adviser and data protection specialist at the ministry, explained that EHIS checks whether a teacher or another education worker entered in the system and working with children is subject to a ban on working with minors. The check runs automatically every ten days and when a worker is first entered into EHIS. Schools can also run the check manually.

If a restriction is found, the educational institution, the school owner and the ministry's supervision department are notified. The principal, or the school owner if the restriction concerns the principal, must ensure that the person stops working with children.

The checks cover hobby-club teachers, kindergarten teachers and their assistants, teachers in general and vocational education, school principals, support specialists and nannies. Since the automatic checks began, there have been 14 cases in which a restriction on working with minors was found.

Rationale and communication

The ban stems from the Child Protection Act, which took effect at the beginning of 2016 and specifies the offences for which convicted people may not work with children. Reintal said that sending separate queries to the register regularly would take too much time, so the check was automated to ease compliance with the law and reduce schools' administrative burden. The ten-day interval is meant to make a restriction take effect quickly, though not all restrictions are lifelong and they can be lifted after a sentence is served.

The provision took effect at the end of 2016. Schools and their owners were informed at the time, and a description of the register queries was added to the EHIS user guide, which is intended mainly for the school's EHIS administrator.

Reintal stressed that the check is not covert, since its grounds, the data processed and the retrieval of data from the register are set out in public legal acts. She added that the ministry needs to look at how to explain the procedure to schools better so that they can pass the information on to their staff.