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Data Retention Schedule by Type

Run the Data Retention Schedule by Type MicroSim fullscreen

About This MicroSim

Four kinds of data, four different rules, and the thing that makes a retention policy work is not the durations — it is naming the event that starts the clock. "Keep for eighteen months" is not actionable. "Eighteen months from the day a student stops attending" is, because somebody can look at a record and work out the date.

Contact information is the strictest: kept only while a family is actively enrolled, deleted promptly when they are not. The temptation is to keep it "in case they come back", and that is precisely the thing to refuse — a list of former families' email addresses is a liability with no current purpose.

Progress records get eighteen months from the last session. Long enough to write a reference or welcome a student back, short enough that the club is not holding a decade of children's skill records.

Survey responses are the interesting case, because they are handled by transformation rather than deletion. Individual free-text responses are summarised and the originals discarded within 90 days; the anonymised summary can be kept indefinitely, because it is no longer about identifiable people. That is how you keep year-over-year comparison without keeping the data.

Consent forms have no clock of their own — they live exactly as long as the data they authorise. That is the right rule and it is easy to get backwards: deleting the consent form while keeping the data leaves you holding data with no record of permission for it.

One practical note: a retention policy nobody executes is worse than none, because it documents an intention you are visibly not meeting. Put the deletion on the calendar.

How to Use

  • Click each band for the retention period and, more importantly, the event that starts it.
  • Read the survey band twice. It is the only one where the answer is transformation rather than deletion.
  • Try Quiz Me to practise placing a record.
  • Then check your own club: which of the four do you actually delete on schedule?

Lesson Plan

Bloom level: Understand (L2) -- classify

Learning objective: Given a type of club data, the learner classifies how long it is retained and what event starts the deletion clock.

Before (5 min). Ask what the club currently deletes and when. "We haven't deleted anything" is the common and honest answer.

With the poster (10 min). Read all four bands. Then, for each, name the event that starts the clock — that is the part that turns a policy into a task.

After (30 min). Put four recurring calendar entries in, one per data type. A retention policy is a calendar problem, not a writing problem.

Check for understanding. Ask: "A family left two years ago. What do you still hold?" An anonymised survey summary, and nothing else — their contact details went when they left, and their progress records went six months ago.

Embedding This MicroSim

Paste this into any page of the book, adjusting the relative path to docs/sims/ for the page's depth:

<iframe src="../../sims/data-retention-schedule/main.html" width="100%" height="752" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Specification

The full specification below is extracted from Chapter 24: Tracking Student Data and Managing Club Communication.

Type: infographic
**sim-id:** data-retention-schedule<br/>
**Library:** Interactive Infographic Overlay (grid-diagram.js, annotation-free poster + rectangular hover zones)<br/>
**Status:** Specified

Purpose: Let a mentor see how long each type of club data is kept and what triggers its deletion, so a retention question can be answered by glancing at one poster instead of hunting through a written policy document.

Bloom Taxonomy: Understand (L2)
Bloom Taxonomy Verb: classify

Learning objective: Given a type of club data, the learner classifies how long it is retained and what event starts the deletion clock.

Image style: Flat stacked-band poster, four full-width horizontal bands from bottom to top, each with a bold printed band label baked into the image since grid overlays hide chip labels by default

Image dimensions: 1000x700 (portrait, to accommodate four stacked bands)

Zones (4 horizontal bands, each with id, label, color, approximate x1/y1/x2/y2 percentage boundaries, one-line summary, and 3 bullet facts), ordered bottom to top from longest-kept to shortest-kept:

1. `consent-forms` -- color #4A90D9 -- boundaries approximately x1:3,y1:76,x2:97,y2:96 -- Summary: "Kept as long as the data they cover is retained." Facts: signed or declined guardian consent forms; retained alongside whatever data they authorize; deleted only when the covered data is deleted
2. `progress-records` -- color #50C878 -- boundaries approximately x1:3,y1:52,x2:97,y2:74 -- Summary: "Retained eighteen months after a student leaves." Facts: badge, attendance, and skill-tracking records; clock starts the day a student stops attending; deleted automatically once the window passes
3. `contact-information` -- color #F5A623 -- boundaries approximately x1:3,y1:28,x2:97,y2:50 -- Summary: "Retained only while a family is actively enrolled." Facts: name and one contact email; removed promptly once a family is no longer active; never kept "just in case" of future re-enrollment
4. `survey-responses` -- color #9B6BC7 -- boundaries approximately x1:3,y1:4,x2:97,y2:26 -- Summary: "Kept in anonymized form only, indefinitely." Facts: individual free-text responses are summarized and the originals discarded within 90 days; anonymized summaries may be kept for year-over-year comparison; no names are ever attached to a retained summary

showLabels: false (band titles are printed in the generated image)

Interactive features: Click or hover any band to highlight its hover zone and reveal its full fact list, including the specific event that starts its deletion clock, in a detail panel; explore mode only.

Implementation: Interactive Infographic Overlay Guide (grid engine) -- `grid-diagram.js` + `grid-overlay.css` render the four rectangular hover zones over the generated poster image; `data.json` holds the 4 zones per the overlay-grid-data-json-schema.

References