We report the results of a study the long term variability of Classical T Tauri stars (CTTS) over up to 20 years, characterize it from a set of statistical parameters and discuss its origin. We characterize the long term photometric variations of 49 CTTs with sufficient data for allowing a robust statistical analysis and propose an empirical classification scheme. Several patterns of long term photometric variability are identified. The most common pattern, exhibited by a group of 15 stars which includes T Tau itself, consists of low level variability (with V-amplitude less than 0.4mag) with no significant changes occurring from season to season over many years. A related subgroup of 22 stars exhibit a similar stable long term variability pattern, though with larger amplitudes (up to 1.6mag). Besides these representative groups, we identify three smaller groups of 3-5 stars each of which have distinctive photometric properties. The long term variability of most CTTS is fairly stable and merely reflects shorter term variability due to cold and hot surface spots. Only a small fraction of CTTS undergo significant brightness changes on the long term (months, years), which probably arise from slowly varying circumstellar extinction.

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