It has been over a decade since “Keep or Bin…? The Care of Parish Records” was last published by the Church of England Records Management Team.
This document is no longer meeting the record-keeping and retention requirements of 2024, leading to a comprehensive review and update with the aims of:
- Ensuring all information is correct
- Adding missing information and categories of records
- Ensuring the retention criteria are defensible
- Making the guide more useable and consistent with other resources from the National and wider church
What’s involved?
The Records Management Team are looking to establish a working group that is representative of parishes, to include:
- Participants from a range of different types of parish from across the country
- Participants who work with the information on a day-to-day basis
- Participants that have capacity to be part of a working group (it is envisaged that there will be regular monthly meetings online via MS Teams)
The hope is participants can share their knowledge and expertise, about the records that they deal with on a day-to-day basis. Although it is not a requirement of participation within the working group, there will be opportunities to undertake more detailed work as the project moves forward.
The aim is to start work in mid-end of May 2024 and complete the review by the end of the year.
Would you like to take part?
If you would like to participate in the working group, please contact Robert Hutton in the Records Management Team by 30th April 2024, at the latest.
In addition, if you have your own records retention schedules that you are currently using, then the project team would welcome the sharing of these as they will be invaluable in forming this piece of work.