Identity and credentials

This is an exit report, dated May 2025. The sandbox work started in Jan 2024 and ended in Jan 2025. The Information Commissioner's Office list of 2025 participants gives the Department for Education an exit date of May 2025. That short account does not mention a blockchain. The report does.

The department entered the sandbox to develop an education credential for post-16 learners in England. The credential uses decentralised identity and verified credentials, so a learner can open, manage and share their information when applying to a further education institution and when enrolling. The aim is to replace paper forms, typing the details in by hand, and photocopying. The office accepted the department in Nov 2023, under the decentralised-identity focus it had then. The report covers only the data-protection aims agreed for the sandbox. The views are the office's understanding of this department. Other organisations may not be able to apply the same points, and the points can change.

The department has chosen a permissioned blockchain, with managed access for schools and further education institutions, to check that a credential is valid. In the report, a blockchain is a ledger that cannot be changed. In digital identity projects it is generally used to manage keys, not to store personal information. One section says the ledger holds public and private keys, which act as a digital signature that the credential comes from a relying party. Earlier, the relying party is the further education institution. A later section says a blockchain is unlikely to affect the right to have data erased, because no personal information is stored on it, only the department's public key. The credential will also use an audit database that records when a credential was issued and what it contained, in a relational database the report calls secure. The office advised that those databases be brought within the rights to correct a record and to have it erased, where erasure applies.

Awarding organisations send exam results to schools and to the department, where they are stored in the Learning Record Service. From there, the results appear in a wallet app, as a verified education credential a learner can choose to share with a further education institution. The department created that app, called the Wallet App, for download from the Google Play store and the Apple app store. A member of staff who knows the learner issues the credential in person, signed in to a service called Issue education records, and the learner scans a QR code with the app. The identifier in the credential is a unique pupil number or a unique learner number.

The sandbox ran alongside a pilot at a small group of schools. The department will take that pilot forward so the identity checks cover hundreds of schools, and the further education organisations that will use the credential. It then needs to consider how to apply the office's advice to the next phase of the roll-out, which the report calls this year. The report does not say a simpler database was chosen instead of the blockchain.

This is an announcement of a pilot, published on 7 May 2025. Exam certificates will go digital for thousands of students this summer, as part of an education record. More than 95,000 young people in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands will also receive their GCSE results through an Education Record app this summer, ahead of a future national roll-out. The announcement does not say that roll-out has happened.

The app is for applying for further education, an apprenticeship or a job, instead of handing paper files on. A minister visited Hathershaw College in Oldham, which had been trying the app since spring 2024, and the department is widening the roll-out after that trial. The announcement does not name a blockchain or a distributed ledger, and it does not mention the sandbox report.

These pages are a beta service for issuing education records. They showed no publication date. Each one says this is a new service. They do not name a blockchain or a distributed ledger. They do not say whether they use the design in the sandbox report.

The page for senior leaders says the app lets year 11 pupils see a digital education record. A record contains the pupil's name, date of birth and address, the schools they have attended, official exam results for qualifications such as GCSEs, and support needs. The school's role is to vouch for the pupil and to issue the record, and the member of staff has to be able to recognise that pupil. The pupil scans a QR code in the app. The page links to the app on the Apple app store and on Google Play. The address of the Apple link contains the words education-record-pilot.

The information comes from official data held by the department. Personal information that is wrong has to be corrected at the school. The page gives the reason in these words: it comes from the last you school you attended. The school then tells the department. The schools attended are worked out from which schools provided information from years 9, 10 and 11. Qualifications come directly from the awarding organisations. If the grades on the record are wrong, the pupil can ask the school to raise a data challenge through the LRS organisational portal.

GCSE results are added to the record when they become available. A pupil uses the app to share the record with a sixth form, a college or a training provider, after that organisation has requested it. The sandbox report also uses the name Learning Record Service. These pages do not say that the portal is the database described in that report.