Privacy policy

In short

• Your school owns the records. Gakuin keeps them for the school and uses them for nothing else.
• There are no advertisements, no tracking, and nothing about your family is sold or shared.
• Questions about your records go to your school office first.

What this covers

The Gakuin app for Android (com.bjorst.gakuin) and the school portals that run on the Gakuin service. One app serves every school on the service: when you sign in with the account your school gave you, the app shows your school's name, colours and records.

The app is for parents and school staff. Pupils do not use it: a pupil's account is refused in the app, and pupils see their own record, where their school allows it, in the school portal.

A school that runs Gakuin under its own name, on its own service, publishes its own policy, and that one applies there instead.

Who holds the records

Your school is in charge of its records. The school decides what is recorded about a pupil and why: admission details, classes, attendance, marks, report cards, fees and payments, and anything a parent sends the school through the app or the portal.

Bjorst runs Gakuin on the school's behalf. Bjorst is the company that builds and operates the service. It does not decide what is collected, does not use the records for anything of its own, does not sell or share them, and does not use them to train anything.

What is recorded

• Who a person is at the school: name, the email address used to sign in, the classes a pupil is in, and which adults are their parents or guardians.
• The school's records: attendance, marks, report cards, fees and payments, library loans, medical notes kept by the school nurse, transport arrangements, and conduct notes.
• Files someone chooses to send: a document attached to an application, or work handed in. The app only reads a file from the phone when the person picks it.
• Messages sent to and from the school office.
• What is needed to sign in: the email address, the password and the fact that a device is signed in. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, so neither the school nor Bjorst can read them.
• A notification token, if someone turns notifications on. It identifies the phone only so the school's messages can reach it, and it is removed when they sign out.

What stays on the phone

The app keeps a few things on the phone so it works quickly and on a poor connection: the sign-in, in the phone's secure storage; the school's name and colour, so the app opens in them; the light or dark setting; which notices have been read; which child a parent last looked at; and, for a teacher, register marks taken without a signal until they are sent. Everything tied to an account is kept separately for that account, and signing out removes the sign-in and the school's name and colour.

What is not recorded

These are things the app cannot do, not promises: it does not ask for the permissions they need.

• No location. The app never asks where a phone is.
• No contacts, camera or microphone.
• No advertising and no advertising identifier. There are no advertisements in the app or the portals, and no third-party advertising or analytics software in either.
• No tracking across other apps or websites.

Children

Many of the people these records describe are children, some of them under 13, and the records are held by their school for the purpose of educating them. Children do not use the Gakuin app: it refuses pupil accounts, and nobody can create an account in the app, because the school issues every account.

A parent's account shows the records of the children the school has recorded them as responsible for, and nobody else's. Where a school gives pupils access to the school portal, a pupil's account shows that pupil their own record.

Deleting records

A pupil or parent cannot delete the school's records, and it is better to say so plainly. A school has to keep an attendance register, marks and a fee ledger, and a former pupil's results must still exist when they ask for a transcript years later. Nothing is collected alongside the school's record that could be deleted separately: there is no advertising profile, no browsing history and no location trail.

What ends is access. When a pupil leaves or a member of staff moves on, the school closes the account: sign-in stops working, notifications stop, and every phone is signed out. You can also ask for your own account to be deleted from your account settings, and your school decides: see Delete your account. If something recorded about you or your child is wrong, the school will correct it.

Where records are kept, and who else handles them

Records are sent over encrypted connections and kept on servers in Europe. A copy of the database is taken every day and a rolling set of recent copies is kept, so a school's records can be restored after a failure. Records are kept for as long as the school needs them.

Nobody outside the school sees them, except the suppliers that make the service work, and each handles them only to provide that service:

• Hetzner, which provides the servers;
• Backblaze, which stores uploaded files and the daily database copies;
• Resend, which delivers the school's emails;
• Expo and Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which deliver notifications to Android phones.

Records may also be disclosed where Nigerian law requires it, or to another school a pupil is transferring to.

Asking a question

Start with your school office. The school answers questions about its own records, including a request to see, correct or stop using something. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 gives you these rights, and the school is who acts on them.

For a question about the app or the service itself, write to Bjorst at gakuin@bjorst.com.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, schools will be told, and the date at the top of this page will change with it.