Long doe records retention

Records that should be kept by an academy or trust

Academies and trusts should follow good practice and retain records about:

All records should be retained in line with regulations and retention guidelines. Details can be found in the Academy Trust Handbook and Data protection in schools – record keeping and management.

Records belonging to an academy or trust that is closing

When an academy closes, records should be retained by the academy or trust, or transferred to the local authority archive service. Records should be retained while they are still actively required for legal or regulatory purposes, until the retention period is reached.

Governance and ‘school history’ records should be offered to the local authority’s archive service for permanent preservation. The ‘school history’ records are items that need to be permanently preserved at an archive – for example, those where there is community interest, such as whole-school photos.

Records that need to be kept for a limited time should be offered to the local authority where the academy was based and include:

• records of pupils who haven’t transferred to another school
• records of staff who do not continue their employment with the trust
• records for the building (including regarding asbestos and chemicals)
• governance records for the academy’s local governing body
• financial records related to the academy or trust

For an academy-only closure where the trust remains operational

Pupil records

For pupils that are transferring to a new educational setting, academies should follow the statutory guidance on keeping and maintaining records and transfer the records to the new school or academy. If pupils transfer to a college or sixth-form, the pupil records must be retained by the academy.

Pupil records that are not following the pupil to a new educational setting should be transferred to the relevant local authority for that area, where the records will remain accessible. This can include when the p

When records have reached the end of their retention period, data must be disposed of securely and confidentially. The ICO has guidance on practical methods for destroying records that are no longer needed.

All records containing personal information or sensitive policy information must be made either unreadable or so you cannot reconstruct it.

Your data retention policy must include your procedures for safely destroying personal data. All staff should be aware of these procedures to help prevent any data breaches.

Do not dispose of records with the regular waste or in a skip.

You should:

• shred paper records using a cross-cutting shredder, or get an external company to shred them
• destroy storage media and hard disks to particles no larger than 6mm
• dismantle and shred audio and video tapes

If you use an external company to destroy records, it must:

• shred all records on-site in the presence of an employee
• be able to prove that the records have been destroyed and provide a certificate of destruction
• have trained its staff in the handling of confidential documents

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires you to maintain a list of records that have been destroyed and who authorised their destruction. You must have approval from a senior leader for the record to be destroyed.

You must document the destruction. Record a brief description of the data, the number of files and who authorised the destruction. Shred the records as soon as you’ve documented them as having been destroyed.

Further guidance is available on record keeping and retention for academies and academy trusts.

Safeguarding and data protection are two crucial responsibilities for school leaders which could be perceived to have conflicting priorities.

Safeguarding is quite rightly a highly sensitive issue where schools must tread carefully, but there are circumstances where data-sharing needs to be encouraged.

The difficulty comes in knowing when and how to apply the right approach in order to avoid making serious mistakes with sensitive information.

Record-keeping is one area where a restrictive data protection approach could potentially create big problems in the future. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), for example, has suggested that any records relating to sexual abuse should stay where a disclosure was made as well as being transferred when the child moves on (Jay et al, 2022).

However, the statutory guidance Keeping children safe in education (DfE, 2023) says that the entire child protection file should transfer to the next school and doesn’t indicate that separate records should be held by each school for these types of incidents.

There is no one answer to the question of how long your school should keep safeguarding records – context and the seriousness of the allegations matter. However, as a rule of thumb it is advisable to keep records in relation to disclosures about sexual abuse, sexual assault, and sexual violence under regular review. The IICSA has also recommended increasing the retention period for this data to a minimum of 75 years.

One of the biggest myths of data protection is that you can’t share anything without parental consent. Schools are often caught in the middle of a tug of war between people who tell them that their data cannot be shared, but in most cases, it is the school’s judgement call that will be respected.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has stated that when a headteacher makes a decision in relation to a specific safeguarding issue the ICO or

In any business, document retention can be a challenge. Knowing which documents to keep and for how long can be particularly difficult as there are various time frames for different types of record.

As there are legal requirements for document retention in the UK, overcoming these challenges and staying on top of the amount of data and number of documents being produced is a must. A document retention policy can help you to do this. But what should it include?

Each department within a company is required to keep different records over varying periods of time. This means that companies need to have several document retention policies that relate to specific departments. In the UK, you need to remember that HMRC (HM Revenues & Customs) will penalise companies that don’t retain relevant records for the specific required time.

Below, we have examined some of the records you may need to keep. This list is not exhaustive, so make sure you refer to the government guidance about developing your own document retention policy.

Accounting document retention policy

As a general rule of thumb, tax returns, financial statements and accounting records should be retained for a minimum of six years. This six-year period should start from the end of the last company financial year that the record relates to. However, this timescale could vary depending on the type of tax that is paid and the industry your business is in.

Your accounting document retention policy should also take into account that some records may need to be kept for longer than six years.

This will be the case if:

• You have purchased something that will last more than six years, such as machinery.
• The record contains a transaction that covers more than one of your accounting periods.
• A Company Tax Return was submitted late.
• HMRC starts a compliance check into your Company Tax Return.