Protectively marked documents - is anybody actually doing this?

[psydii]

At least a couple of sources of guidance are recommending schools adopt the Government Security Classifications for documents that contain sensitive data.

 

Is anybody actually doing this? If so, how have you implemented it in email and reports from your MIS?

 

Personally I'm not sure it will ever be reasonable to expect teachers and support staff to understand that OFFICIAL in effect mean 'don't share this document without referring to policy', particularly with 20 years of not using such marking.

[crc-ict]

Can't see a point myself - surely everything would just end up being marked 'Official'?

 

I don't see anything in a school that would warrant 'Secret' or above? So everything would be marked in the one category.

[enjay]

We decided not to, instead explaining to staff the different IL levels and telling them to use their initiative. Because it isn't possible to mark every document (e.g. some IL3 documents come in from County or NHS and we can't mark them), we decided it better to tell people how to treat the documents than have some marked and some not marked, and risk people not handling a document correctly because it hadn't been marked.

[jmak]

I've told staff that we have two categories of document:

 

Those that contain data that needs to be controlled (eg personal or sensitive (private to the school)

 

Those that don't: essentially lesson plans which don't refer to individuals.

 

Anything in the first category should be protected - we don't have different levels of action.

I did this as I thought anything more granular would be too complicated for people to comply with and not worth the effort.

[enjay]

Those that don't: essentially lesson plans which don't refer to individuals.

 

Careful. One school my wife taught in, they had to name SEN students on their lesson plans and specifically identify how they would support that student. This might not be compulsory with you, but some staff might do it anyway so even lesson plans might need to be controlled.