The ERC is a statutory body under the aegis of the Department of Education. Our remit is to:

• Conduct educational research.

• Create standardised testing materials

• Supply schools and centres of education with standardised testing materials.

DOTS is an online testing system that aids schools in conducting standardised tests online. It also operates as our e-commerce platform for the purchase of paper test materials.

A range of data types is available to be uploaded to DOTS by individual schools. In general it comprises of

• School name

• School contact information

• Student name

• Student DOB

• Class information

• Raw test response data

• Test report data

The school makes decision about which students' data are uploaded to DOTS and manages their student's data. For more information about how schools manage student data, please contact the school directly.

A retention schedule is the period of time your data stays on the DOTS system. The school often has a different retention period to the ERC's retention period for the same data. The ERC has the following retention schedules for data held on DOTS. These schedules are reviewed periodically considering experience and legal or other relevant indications.

Any data inputted by a school to the DOTS system during an academic year is deleted the January of the following academic year after anonymisation.

This data includes all:

• Student data – student names, student date of birth

• Class data – class names, student information

• Test data – test item responses

• Reports data – any reports generated from completed tests, machine-scoring, or paper test scoring

Please refer to the below schedule for the download date for your school's data. Once this data has been anonymised and deleted in can no longer be accessed by the ERC.

DOTS Data Deletion Schedule

Data anonymisation is the removal of all identifiable data points in a data set. In the case of data from DOTS, information like student name & teacher name will be deleted. Dates of birth will be amended. This ensures that no individual student can be identified from the remaining data. This is an important security measure that enables the ERC to use the remaining data for research purposes or for the purposes of developing new tests.

The security of school and child information is of the utmost importance to the Educational Research Centre. We use state-of-the-art security to safeguard information entered by the school on the DOTS platform. Data is stored and processed in strict compliance with Irish and European data protection laws. We use the appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure security of information. They include but are not limited to:

• Entrance controls

• User access controls

• Password protection

• Data access controls

• Confidentiality commitment

• Legislative compliance

Data Access Controls

• DOTS implements users roles to ensure authenticated users are only able to access system functionality relevant to their job role.

• The DOTS platform has authentication and authorization features, which restricts the data users can access. Schools can only access their own data.

Dots Platform School & Student Data inputted by Schools through DOTS is stored on an encrypted server hosted in the EEA on a secure cloud platform. The ERC DOTS platform and its cloud storage have extensive security features and protocols to protect personal data. If you have any further queries, please contact us at tests@erc.ie .

Please see our corporate governance page for further information on our data protection and GDPR policies.

Email: Data.Protection@erc.ie

Telephone: (01) 837 3789

Address: The Data Protection Officer,

The Educational Research Centre,

St. Patrick’s Campus,

Drumcondra Road Upper,

Dublin D09 AN2F

Additional information is also available on the website of the Data Protection Commissioner:

https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/Home/4.htm