Many people use Find a Lost TRN to access their DQT record via the Teacher Self Service Portal (TSSP).
TSSP accounts that were created before 2014 and haven’t been used are locked by default. At present, the only way to unlock your account is to contact the TRA helpdesk.
This means that many of our users still have to contact the helpdesk after retrieving their TRN to finish their task.
Automatic account unlocking
When we have matched someone to a TRN, we will set their record to unlocked automatically if:
- it is locked
- it doesn’t have any alerts (we can’t unlock records with alerts relating to prohibitions, because people who are prohibited have their TRN published to GOV.UK, so anyone could access their record through the portal), and
- the email address given has not been used to find another TRN
If an email address has been used to find another TRN, we’ll still allow the TRN to be sent out but we will not unlock the TSSP account. We’ll also log the email address, so that we can contact these users to find out more about their need to look up multiple people’s TRNs.
We are not asking extra questions
We considered asking extra questions in the Find flow, such as:
- do you want your TSSP account to be unlocked?
- are you requesting a TRN for yourself or someone else?
- why do you need your TRN?
We hoped these answers might be able to steer us towards whether we should unlock or not. But each had their own problems.
Do you want your TSSP account to be unlocked?
This is a difficult question to phrase, for a proportion it would be easy to answer, for others we would need to explain:
- what TSSP is
- why an account might be locked
- why you would want to unlock it
We’d need research to explore this, but our hunch is that a TSSP related question would be too leftfield for many users.
Are you requesting for yourself or someone else?
We could ask if the user is trying to get their own TRN or someone else’s, and unlock based on the response. We decided that, for now, we do not want to explicitly call out the requesting of TRNs by others.
Why do you need your TRN?
A less direct approach would be to ask, ‘Why do you need your TRN?’, and checkboxes could include ‘to access TSSP’. Checking that box would unlock their account. Of the question, this is the mostly likely one to include – the data would be otherwise valuable.
We would need research to know what options to show, and we’d need an “other” option.
But why should we ask an unnecessary question with limited benefit to most users, when we could do the unlocking automatically?
We decided not to add this question.