Managing student records in compliance with regulatory obligations

If you handle and store information about identifiable, living people, e.g. students, you are legally obliged to protect that information. Under the Data Protection Act you must:

• Keep it secure
• Ensure it is relevant and up to date
• Only hold as much as you need and only for as long as you need it
• Allow the subject of the information to see it on request

The Freedom of Information Act gives students the right to see not only their personal information which is held by an academic institution but also their educational records. If a request by a student is made the relevant information must be supplied within 20 working days.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has developed and approved a model publication scheme which demands that every local authority, including schools, should have a records management and personal data policy which includes:

• Information security policies
• Records retention destruction and archive policies
• Data protection (including information sharing policies)

The policy must also ensure that records relating to the academic aspects of the student’s relationship with the institution are clearly segregated from those dealing with financial, disciplinary and social aspects. This will enable differential retention periods to be applied to each of these to meet business and regulatory requirements.

The nature of student records and the personal information they contain demand that they should be stored in facilities and equipment or electronic systems which are, above all, secure and accessible only to authorised personnel. The storage facility should also provide adequate space for the records to be retained and appropriate environmental conditions.

If student records are kept in paper format, complying with all the above requirements will be difficult, labour intensive and time consuming. Even in electronic format, records may not be easy to manage unless the system they are stored in has the necessary functionality. With this in mind, The IPC Group has developed a compliance tool called mstore for Education which can help schools and colleges achieve conformity with these regulatory obligations. It is a highly secure electronic student records management system with automated document retention which can be assigned to individual elements of a student record. mstore for Education is structured to allow easy retrieval by authorised individuals and has an audit facility to track all activity within the system.

For further details about mstore for Education please click here or call The IPC Group on 08081 45 46 47.