I'm having a sort out of paperwork, including records for pupils.

I have records of pupils who stopped lessons three or four years ago. Is there any need to keep them? There's no legal (for want of a better term) requirement to keep them is there?

Thanks.

IANA lawyer, or data protection expert....but I strongly suspect that if there's any legal requirement, it'll swing the other way, so that you should keep them no longer than necessary and to dispose of them securely (i.e. shredding them, in the case of paper records).

Reasons to keep them, or at least some or parts of them, could be for your own financial records, as part of a record of your own long-term professional development, or so on.

Agreed. The general principle is that you can keep personal data for only as long as it is necessary to do so. In the commercial financial world, the rule is that you destroy personally identifiable data 6 years after the relationship with the customer has terminated, unless some other reason compels holding the data (e.g. a "disposal hold" notice, court order, certain tax data etc).

I should imagine that your position is less complex than this! If you don't need it, then I'd be getting rid of it.

I keep bits of different pupils records for different times. Eg, if I've had a pupil at school who has had issues with their playing then I might keep the record for an academic year in case there's something that arises from a report I've written, or a query from the senior school that they've moved on to (but that's never actually happened).

Private pupils - I tend to keep a cover sheet which records exams passed, and contact details, for a while - say a year, but generally I get a gut instinct and dispose of them within 6 months in the general scheme of having a tidy up. If anyone returned to me, I'd have to find new material anyway, and we'd have to backtrack a bit.

There's no requirement to keep records even for current pupils so you should feel no obligation to keep them for those who have left. I'd imagine those who have full time work with individual lessons could not keep records at all once their pupils have left. (unless they are high tech and it's all computerised.)

Mine are kept with my financial records as each batch of notes/details includes a sheet detailing fees paid. They get shredded when I turf out the old stuff each Tax Year.

Late-for-Work-Bag x

Financial records should be kept for 7 years, ideally, because that's as far as the Revenue can go back to query things.