Privacy Policy

Who this covers

Gradow is software that schools, tuition classes, and other education institutes (“Institutes”) use to manage students, teachers, classes, attendance, and fees. This page explains what information Gradow holds, how it’s used, and who can see it — both for the people who log in to an Institute (Admins, Teachers, and Students who’ve been given portal access) and for the students who make up most of the people an Institute’s data is actually about, whether or not they ever log in themselves.

An Institute — not Gradow — decides what information to add about its own students, teachers, and any guardian contacts, and is responsible for having the right, under its own arrangements with families, to give that information to us. We store and show it back exactly as the Institute enters it.

The company behind Gradow

Pending — needs a lawyer, not code. This document should name the legal entity that operates Gradow and provide a registered address or contact for formal notices. Neither exists in the codebase to check, so we’re leaving this as an open item for the owner rather than inventing one. This section stays here, visibly incomplete, until that’s filled in.

Information we hold

For anyone with a Gradow login (an Admin or Teacher, or a Student who has been given portal access):

• Name and email address
• A password, always stored hashed (bcrypt) — never in plain text, and never readable by us or anyone else once it’s set

For every Student and Teacher on an Institute’s roll — whether or not they ever log in (most students don’t hold a login at all):

• Name and a roll number or employee ID the Institute assigns
• Email and phone number, if the Institute has and enters them — neither is required to add someone to the roll, only to invite them to log in
• For students specifically: a guardian’s name and phone number, if entered, and an admission date

Academic and administrative records an Institute keeps in Gradow:

• Which classes a student is enrolled in, and which classes a teacher teaches
• Attendance, recorded per lesson
• Fee status an Institute has manually marked (paid or not) — Gradow has no payment processing built in at all, so we never collect or store card, bank, or other payment details; fee tracking in Gradow is the Institute’s own manual bookkeeping
• Results of multiple-choice tests a student has attempted, where a teacher uses that feature
• Which homework a student has been given, and whether and when they completed each item
• Files and images a teacher uploads — study materials, question papers, and images used in multiple-choice tests. These belong to the teacher personally, not to any one Institute: a teacher’s own library follows them if they teach at more than one Institute, and an item only becomes visible within a specific Institute once the teacher shares it into one of that Institute’s classes.

If a student uses the personal notes feature, we also hold whatever they write there — a title and a free-text body they create for themselves. This can include anything the student chooses to type, including personal details about themselves or someone else, the same way any free-text field can. Two things make it different from everything else on this page: it belongs to the student, not the Institute — there’s no path for an Institute’s Admin or Teacher to read it — and unlike the rest of an Institute’s records, a student deleting a note actually erases it, not just hides it from a list.

We don’t run advertising trackers or any third-party analytics on Gradow today.

Who can see it

Every Institute’s data is kept apart from every other Institute’s, enforced three separate ways in our systems: which Institute you’re currently in comes only from your own signed-in session, never from anything a browser could ask for directly; every database query is automatically limited to your own Institute; and, as a last line of defence, the database itself refuses to hand back another Institute’s rows even if application code asked for them by mistake.

Within one Institute, what a person can see depends on their role:

• An Admin can see and manage all of that Institute’s data.
• A Teacher sees the classes they teach and the students enrolled in them — not the whole Institute’s roll.
• A Student with portal access sees only their own attendance, fees, test results, and shared materials — never another student’s.

The product’s design also defines two further roles — Staff and Teaching Assistant, each meant to see a narrower slice than an Admin or Teacher — but neither can actually be granted to anyone today; there is no way, anywhere in the product, to give a person either one. We’re naming this rather than describing access that doesn’t exist, or silently leaving it out.

The roles above are what the product enforces for anyone using it, including Gradow’s own team — there is no support or admin role built into the application that bypasses them. That’s different from administrative access to the underlying database, which exists the way it does for any hosted service: someone with that level of access could, in principle, read data directly, the same way a database administrator at any company that stores customer data can. This page describes what the software does, not a guarantee that database-level access is impossible.

How long we keep it

• A sign-up confirmation link stops working 14 days after it’s sent, if unused — and the record behind it is deleted at that point, not just deactivated.
• An invitation to join an Institute stops working 14 days after it’s sent, if unaccepted — but unlike a sign-up link, the invitation record itself is not deleted. It’s marked “expired” and kept, the same as everything else in the undefined-retention bucket described below.
• A login session is automatically cleared from our systems roughly a week after it lapses.

For the core records an Institute keeps — student and teacher profiles, attendance, fees, test results — we do not currently have a fixed retention period or an automatic deletion schedule. This is stated plainly here rather than invented, because it’s genuinely not decided yet. An Institute can mark a student or teacher record “archived,” which removes them from everyday lists but does not erase the underlying record — attendance history, past enrolment, and fee records stay intact for the Institute’s own use. That means an archived record is retained, not deleted, unless a specific removal request is made (see below).

One category is different, and worth saying plainly given the above: a student’s personal notes (see “Information we hold”) are genuinely deleted, not archived, when the student deletes one — because that content belongs to the student rather than the Institute, there’s no institute-side history for a delete to have to preserve.

What leaves Gradow

• Email. Gradow sends email for things like confirming a sign-up or inviting someone to an Institute’s roster, through a standard email-delivery service. We haven’t finalized which provider we’ll use once the product is live for real institutes, and we’ll update this page once we have.
• File storage. Files a teacher uploads are stored with Backblaze B2, a cloud storage provider, and are scanned for malware by our own virus scanner before storage — that scan runs on our own infrastructure, not a third party’s.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

Children’s data

Many students on an Institute’s roll are minors. Gradow is provided to Institutes, not directly to children — the Institute (and, through it, a parent or guardian) decides what information about a student is entered and controls the relationship with that student’s family. Gradow does not independently verify anyone’s age. If a student is given their own Gradow login, that decision and its terms are the Institute’s own, under its own policies for its students.

Security

Passwords are always stored hashed, never in plain text. Your login session is held in a cookie your browser sends automatically; no script running on any page — ours or anyone else’s — can read it.

Your choices

If you’re a student, teacher, or guardian with a question about your data, or you’d like it corrected or removed, the Institute you’re associated with is the right first contact — they hold and control your record, and today, removal on our side means an Institute archiving it (see “How long we keep it” above), not an automatic erasure. If you’d like to reach Gradow directly about a privacy question, email support@gradow.com.

Changes to this policy

We may update this page as the product changes. Once this moves past draft status, we’ll note here when it was last meaningfully changed.