Check a Teacher's Record: How Schools Verify QTS

Search for "how do schools check QTS" and you'll find a great deal of vague reassurance and very little about the actual mechanism. Part of the reason is that the DfE has renamed and restructured this system more than once, so a page written a few years ago describes something that no longer exists under that name. Part of the reason is that two genuinely separate checks — the qualification check and the criminal-record check — get run at the same time, by the same HR team, for the same job, and so get talked about as if they were one thing.

This page sets out precisely what happens: the service a school actually opens, what it can and cannot see, the identifier that makes the whole thing work, and where the criminal-record side sits as a genuinely separate requirement. It applies whether you trained in England twenty years ago or are applying for your first teaching post from overseas next term — the mechanism doesn't change, even though what it finds does.

The service schools actually use

The current, correct answer is Check a teacher's record, a free GOV.UK service at check-a-teachers-record.education.gov.uk. A school, college, local authority or teacher supply agency uses it before someone starts working for them in England, as a mandatory part of their safeguarding checks, accessed through a DfE Sign-in account that organisations request via their own approver or a GOV.UK contact form. To check a single person you need their last name, date of birth and confirmation of identity — their TRN is only needed for checking several people at once.

This has not always been the name. The service was previously called Employer Access, part of a wider system generally referred to internally as Teacher Services. The DfE's own service-design documentation records that it renamed the service because "Employer Access" told users nothing about what the tool actually did, and rebuilt it around the same underlying teacher record with a name that says exactly what happens when you use it. A related, separate tool, Check the children's barred list, was introduced alongside it for the narrower barred-list check described below.

What a school's check actually shows

A record returned through Check a teacher's record tells an employer a specific, bounded set of things.

• QTS, QTLS or EYTS status — qualified teacher status, qualified teacher learning and skills status, or early years teacher status, treated as distinct award types.
• Whether you have completed statutory induction — the early career teacher period that must be passed before QTS stops being conditional in practice.
• National professional qualifications and mandatory qualifications recorded against your name, including mandatory qualifications for teaching pupils with sensory impairments.
• Whether you have been prohibited from teaching, carry a historic sanction from the legacy General Teaching Council for England, or have been found guilty of serious misconduct without being formally prohibited.

What it does not show is any criminal record information at all — there is no conviction data, caution data or barred-list flag in a Check a teacher's record result, because that lives in a different government system entirely, covered below. The prohibition and sanctions side is substantial enough that we've covered it as its own topic: our guide to checking the prohibited teachers list and our guide to how prohibition orders work go through exactly what a prohibition order, an interim order and a published hearing outcome each mean. This page treats that as context, not a substitute for that detail.

The TRN: the identifier behind every check

Every one of these checks runs on a single identifier: your teacher reference number.

A TRN is issued once, the first time you enter initial teacher training or a route to QTS in England, and it does not change if you move schools, change your name or take a career break. It is the key that a school's Check a teacher's record search resolves to, the number your qualifications and induction outcome are filed under, and the reference Teachers' Pensions uses to track your service. If you're asked for it during recruitment and can't immediately find it, check a payslip or a pension statement first, since it appears on both, or use the DfE's find a lost TRN service. As a last resort, the teaching qualifications help desk can trace it from your name, date of birth and National Insurance number. Treat it with reasonable care — it's a personal identifier, and GOV.UK's own guidance asks you to share it only with your employer or a verified official body, not with agencies you haven't checked out.

Enhanced DBS checks: the other half of safer recruitment

This is where two genuinely different checks get run together and, very commonly, talked about as if they were one. They are not. A school checking your QTS is asking the Department for Education whether you're a qualified, unrestricted teacher. A school running your enhanced DBS check is asking the Disclosure and Barring Service, an entirely separate body, whether you have a relevant criminal history or appear on the barred list.

Both are statutory requirements under Keeping Children Safe in Education, and both must be satisfied before you start in most roles. Neither substitutes for the other: a clean DBS certificate says nothing about whether your degree and teacher training are genuine, and a confirmed QTS award says nothing about whether you have a relevant conviction. We've covered DBS levels, current fees and realistic processing times fully on our own DBS checks for teachers guide rather than repeating them here. The point worth taking from this page is simpler: "how do schools verify me" is really two separate legal processes running in parallel, not one combined background check.

The single central record and what KCSIE requires

Both checks end up in the same place administratively: a school or college's single central record, the statutory log of pre-appointment checks Keeping Children Safe in Education requires for every member of staff. The guidance treats the qualification check as one distinct line among several, rather than folding it into the DBS entry.

• An identity check.
• A barred list check.
• An enhanced DBS check, with the date the certificate was requested or provided.
• A prohibition from teaching check, with the date — the Check a teacher's record search above, run under the Secretary of State's power in section 141B of the Education Act 2002.
• Further checks on anyone who has lived or worked outside the UK, such as an overseas criminal record certificate.
• A check of professional qualifications, where required — the QTS, QTLS or EYTS confirmation this page is mainly about.
• A right to work in the UK check.

The practical effect for you as a candidate is that your qualification check doesn't vanish into a general "vetting" folder — it's a distinct, dated entry an inspector can ask to see by name. That's also why a school genuinely cannot skip it or take your word for your QTS: the guidance requires the check itself to have been carried out, not merely evidence that the underlying qualification exists.

Trained overseas or via an alternative route?

Everything above assumes there's an English QTS award sitting on the TRA's database, filed under your TRN, for Check a teacher's record to find. For a teacher who trained overseas or came through a non-standard route, that assumption doesn't always hold, and the verification picture looks different — not harder in principle, just aimed at a different question.

If you've already been awarded QTS — through the recognition service, the assessment only route, or international qualified teacher status (iQTS) — your record is filed under a TRN exactly like anyone else's, and a school's check finds it the same way. The interesting case is a teacher relying on the four-year rule to teach in England without QTS while working toward it: there is genuinely nothing for the TRA record to show yet, because it only reflects English awards. A school employing such a teacher has to look elsewhere for its assurance — direct contact with referees at official institutional email addresses, documentary evidence of professional registration at home, and increasingly a UK ENIC statement of comparability where a qualification's academic level needs confirming. None of that runs through Check a teacher's record; it's due diligence the school does itself, alongside the standard checks above.

We've written the country-specific and route-specific detail elsewhere rather than repeating it here, since this page is about the verification mechanism rather than eligibility. For which countries carry a recognised qualification, what changed for Ghana, India and Nigeria in September 2026, and which routes to QTS carry no country condition at all, see our guides to countries not eligible for QTS recognition and QTS routes after the 2026 closures, our country pages on Ghana, India, Nigeria and Jamaica, South Africa and Singapore, and our assessment only route guide and overseas QTS page for getting the award itself.

What to expect as an applicant

Stripped of the legal detail, the sequence for a candidate is short and predictable.

This is a narrow slice of a bigger process. For the fuller candidate-side picture — self-declaration forms, slow references, and how agency checks compare — see our safer recruitment guide for candidates.

Discrepancies and delays: what they mean, and what to do

Occasionally a check surfaces something that doesn't match what you expected — induction shown as incomplete when you're certain you finished it, a name that no longer matches your current legal name, or simply a result that takes far longer to come back than it should. Almost all of these have mundane causes rather than sinister ones.

• A name change never reached the TRA — common after marriage or a formal deed change, and easily fixed once flagged.
• Your training provider hasn't yet notified the TRA that you completed statutory induction, which is a step the provider or your induction tutor is responsible for reporting, not something that updates automatically the moment you finish.
• A data-entry error from years ago, particularly for anyone whose original record predates full digitisation of the old GTCE data.
• A duplicate or lost TRN, most often affecting someone who trained a long time ago, took an extended career break, or moved between education systems.

In every case, the right move is the same: ask the school precisely which field is showing the problem, then check your own record through Access your teaching qualifications rather than taking the school's summary as the full picture. A correction has to go through the DfE directly — a school's HR team cannot edit the underlying TRA record — and the teaching qualifications help desk exists precisely for this, with requests normally straightforward once you can evidence what the record should say.

A delay is a separate problem from a discrepancy. Most Check a teacher's record searches resolve close to instantly; a genuine delay almost always traces back to a mismatch in the details entered — a maiden name against a married name, or a date of birth typo — rather than any backlog in the system. Flagging it early and offering to confirm your details resolves most cases faster than waiting for the school to work it out unprompted.

Getting your own paperwork ready first

Because none of this is complicated once you know what's coming, a small amount of preparation before you start applying removes almost all of the friction.

• Know your TRN and keep it findable — a payslip, a pension statement, or a note with your other professional documents.
• Check your own record through Access your teaching qualifications before job hunting, not after a school flags a problem with it.
• Keep your original QTS certificate and award letter — a school wants to see the original, and the DBS Update Service does not replace it.
• Tell referees to expect contact from an official school email address they might not recognise.
• If you've lived or worked abroad, start an overseas criminal record certificate early — it's the slowest part of the process and outside a school's control once requested.

Sources and accuracy

The name, access route and the list of what a check reveals come from GOV.UK's current guidance, Check a teacher's record, at check-a-teachers-record.education.gov.uk. The service's previous name, Employer Access, and the stated reason for the rename come from the DfE's own service-design documentation. The definition of a TRN and how to trace a lost one come from GOV.UK's Teacher reference number (TRN) guidance. The single central record requirements reflect the statutory record-keeping duty in Keeping Children Safe in Education. The legal basis for a prohibition order sits in section 141B of the Education Act 2002, as inserted by section 8 of the Education Act 2011; the section 128 direction regime sits in a separate part of the same Act. DBS levels, fees and timescales, and the fuller candidate-side process, are covered in depth on our own DBS checks guide and safer recruitment guide rather than repeated here. This page is independent guidance, is not affiliated with the DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency or the Disclosure and Barring Service, and is not a substitute for a school's own safeguarding policy.