None

Financial penalty

Reprimand, no fine

2 November 2022

Date on the register

UK GDPR

Law relied on

UK GDPR Article 5(1)(a), UK GDPR Article 5(1)(f)

Central government

Sector

14 actions on the register

In one line

The ICO issued Department for Education with a reprimand on 2 November 2022 under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. No financial penalty attaches to it.

01The record

Organisation named: Department for Education
Action: Reprimand
Date published: 2 November 2022
Register year: 2022
Law relied on: UK GDPR
Provisions cited: UK GDPR Article 5(1)(a), UK GDPR Article 5(1)(f)
Penalty: None (not a financial penalty)
Sector on the register: Central government
ICO register reference: 17257
Register status: Published on the ICO enforcement register, 4 September 2026
Notice documents: 1 PDF published by the ICO
Sector share of register: 14 of 216 actions (6%)
Actions published that year: 32
Actions under this law: 95
Position on the register: 29th of 216, oldest first
Published the same day: This entry alone

02What happened, and where it sits

Department for Education received an ICO reprimand on 2 November 2022. The Commissioner acted under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, citing UK GDPR Article 5(1)(a) and UK GDPR Article 5(1)(f). A formal criticism on the public record. A reprimand carries no fine and no order, but it is published and the ICO expects the shortcomings named in it to be fixed.

No sum is attached to this action. Reprimands are corrective, not financial, which is why Department for Education appears on the register without a figure beside it.

Department for Education is filed under Central government, which accounts for 14 of the 216 actions on the register (6%). In 2022 the ICO published 32 enforcement actions in total, 31 of them reprimands. 95 actions on the register name UK GDPR.

Counted from the oldest entry forward, this is the 29th of 216 actions on the register and the 8th of 14 in Central government. The ICO publishes one document for this action, 357 KB in total: "Department for Education reprimand". It is the authority for everything on this page.

03The ICO's own account

The DfE permitted third party access to the LRS database outside of the DfE and subsequent processing took place of some of that personal data (including children) for the purposes of age verification, without appropriate control or oversight. The investigation has found that therefore the personal data on the LRS database was processed in an insecure manner and for purposes that were not initially intended. Furthermore, the DfE failed to be transparent about that processing.

Quoted from the ICO's published register entry (ico.org.uk), Open Government Licence v3.0.

The law behind this action

UK GDPR

The UK GDPR is the data protection regime the ICO enforces against controllers and processors. Its upper tier is capped at £17.5 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

All 95 register actions under UK GDPR

What a reprimand does

A formal criticism on the public record. A reprimand carries no fine and no order, but it is published and the ICO expects the shortcomings named in it to be fixed.

Published notice

PDFDepartment for Education reprimand(357 KB)

04Nearest entries on the register

Closest by sector, law and date
Organisation	Date	Action	Law	Penalty	Sector
Department for Work and Pensions	31 Oct 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Secretary of State for the Home Department (Home Office)	16 Aug 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Department of Health and Social Care	11 Jul 2022	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
Executive Office	21 Jul 2023	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government
ACRO Criminal Records Office	7 Aug 2026	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Central government

All Central government actions/All 2022 actions/The full register

05Work out an exposure of your own

Article 83 fine calculator

Estimate upper and lower tier exposure from turnover and infringement type, on the same scale the ICO works to.

How a fine is calculated

The Article 83(2) factors, the turnover caps, and how a regulator gets from a contravention to a number.

The ICO profile

How the UK regulator works post-Brexit, the £17.5M and £8.7M UK GDPR caps, and its divergence from the EU regime.

Provenance and independence

Source: ICO enforcement register (ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/), as published on 4 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

GDPRFine.com is an independent tracker of ICO enforcement. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Information Commissioner's Office, and it uses no ICO branding. Where the ICO's own wording is reproduced it is quoted and attributed; everything else on these pages is our own summary of the published record.

The ICO's register held 222 entries on that date. 6 of them are prosecutions of named individuals, with ages and home towns in the ICO's own summary. This tracker indexes organisations, so those 6 are excluded and every count on these pages is out of 216. They remain on the ICO's own register.

An entry says what the Commissioner did on the date shown. It is not a statement about the organisation today, and the ICO can amend or remove a register entry at any time. Amounts and provisions are as published by the ICO; where the published notice does not state a figure or name a provision, these pages say so rather than filling the gap. This entry was read from the register page at https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2022/11/department-for-education/.