WHERE YOUR SCHOOL'S
DATA ACTUALLY LIVES.

1. Where the data is stored

Managed Skoolarz instances run in named data-centre regions, and your contract states which one. We do not move a school's data between regions without written agreement. If your ministry or board requires data residency in a specific country, tell us during evaluation rather than after signing — it is an architecture question, not a pricing one.

2. Self-hosted deployment

Skoolarz can be deployed on infrastructure you control. In that arrangement you own the servers, the backups and the network boundary; we provide the application, the upgrade path and support. This is available on Enterprise agreements and it genuinely changes the operational responsibilities on both sides — we will walk through exactly which ones before you commit.

3. Who inside Skoolarz can see records

Support engineers need some access to diagnose real problems, and we would distrust any vendor who claims otherwise. What matters is that the access is limited by role, time-bound, logged, and auditable — and that we can show you the log on request. We do not browse school data for product research, and we do not use student records to train models.

4. Attribution and audit

Changes to grades, fee waivers, record deletions and permission changes are attributable to a user and a timestamp. This protects the school considerably more than it protects us: it is the difference between "we think it was an error" and "we know exactly what happened, and when".

5. Parent account verification

Parent portals are the softest surface in any school system, because they are the only accounts held by people the school does not employ. Guardian accounts are created by the school, linked to specific students as records, and activated by the guardian through a tokenised invitation — the office never holds or types a family's password. Guardian links can be ended and re-established, with an audit trail, because custody arrangements change in every school eventually.

6. Backups and restore

Managed instances are backed up daily with point-in-time recovery, retained for 30 days. More importantly, restores are rehearsed on a schedule rather than assumed — a backup nobody has restored is a hypothesis. We will tell you the date of the last restore test and the measured recovery time; if a vendor cannot, that is informative.

7. Third parties

Some capabilities depend on services outside our infrastructure, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Live classes use Jitsi Meet. Transactional email leaves through a mail provider. SMS, where a school enables it, goes through a regional gateway. Payment processing, where used, is handled by the payment provider — card details never reach Skoolarz. The current list, with jurisdictions, is provided in the contract annex and updated when it changes.

8. Exit

You can export students, guardians, attendance, grades, invoices, payments and uploaded files in structured formats, at any time and at no charge. The contract states how quickly a full export is provided on termination and how long we retain a copy afterwards before deletion. "You can export to CSV" is not an exit plan if the export omits attachments and relationships; ours does not.

9. What we do not claim

We are not certified against ISO 27001 or SOC 2 today. Some vendors in this market are; several who imply it are not. If a formal certification is a hard requirement for your board, say so early and we will tell you honestly whether we are a fit for this procurement cycle rather than wasting a term of your time.