Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

Data controller for school records: each school that uses the Service. Contact: the school’s office.

Data processor: the platform operator, the operator’s registered address. Data protection contact: the operator’s data protection contact.

2. What information is used

• Students: name, admission number, date of birth, gender, class, photo (if added), attendance, homework, assessments and report cards, behaviour records, and health information the school or parents provide (such as allergies and medical conditions).
• Parents and guardians: name, phone number, email, relationship to the child, address, fees and payments, messages with staff, and who may collect the child.
• Staff: name, contact details, staff number, job title, check-in times, leave, duties, timetable and lesson notes.
• Applicants for admission: the details given on the application form.
• Technical information needed to keep accounts secure: sign-in times, a record of important actions, and, if you turn on notifications, a notification address for your device. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

3. Why it is used, and the lawful basis

To educate and care for students and run the school: performance of the contract with parents and staff, the school’s legitimate interests, and the school’s legal obligations.

Health and welfare information (sensitive personal data): to protect the child’s vital interests and with the consent of a parent or guardian, used only by those who need it, such as the child’s teachers seeing an allergy alert.

Children’s information: processed with the consent of a parent or guardian where the law requires it, and always in the child’s best interests.

Online payments: to take fees through the school’s chosen payment provider, under the contract with the parent.

4. Who can see it

Only people who need to: staff according to the permissions their title gives them; parents for their own children; and students for their own assignments, timetable and report cards. Private messages can be read only by the two people in the conversation, unless a teacher chooses to share them with the school leadership, the school requires sharing for safeguarding, or a message is reported.

Service providers acting for the Operator under contract (sub-processors): Neon (database hosting, Frankfurt, Germany); Vercel (application hosting); Upstash (optional; holds only change counters, with no names or content, so pages know when to refresh); and browser push services from Google, Apple and Mozilla (for notifications, which contain no message text). Payment providers (Paystack or Flutterwave) receive what they need to take a payment, under the school’s own agreement with them.

Files (photos, backups, archived older records and cached documents) are kept in storage the school chooses and pays for, such as Google Cloud Storage, under the school’s own agreement with that provider.

We never sell personal information or use it for advertising.

5. Information held outside Nigeria

Records are stored in data centres in the European Union (Frankfurt), which provide strong data protection. Files are stored wherever the school’s chosen storage provider holds them; the school chooses the provider and location. Transfers are made under the safeguards required by the NDPA (Part VIII), including contracts that bind providers to protect the data.

6. How it is protected

Each school has its own separate database. Connections are encrypted (HTTPS). Passwords are stored only as secure one-way hashes. Messages, absence-note reasons, health information and behaviour details are additionally encrypted in the database with a key unique to each school. Accounts lock after repeated wrong passwords. Every important action is recorded in the school’s activity log. Backups are taken nightly.

Messages are encrypted when stored (“encrypted at rest”), not end to end. This is deliberate: the school’s principal or administrator may be given access to conversations, when a teacher shares a conversation or when the school turns on “always share” for safeguarding. Please write messages knowing that school leadership may read them. The Operator could technically decrypt messages but does not do so except where required by law.

7. How long it is kept

Student records are kept while the student is at the school and afterwards for as long as the school needs them for references, transcripts and legal obligations (the school sets its own retention rules). Older everyday detail (past terms’ register marks, homework ticks, notice read receipts, older activity log entries and checked transfer notices) is moved into the school’s own storage after the periods the school sets, and can be brought back when needed. Applications that do not lead to enrolment are deleted after one year. If the school stops using the Service, its data is deleted 60 days after it leaves, once it has had the chance to export it; files in the school’s own storage remain under the school’s control.

If a school’s Belloft payment stays unpaid, the school is first made view-only, then paused, and, as set out in the Terms of Service (section 6), the school and all its records are permanently deleted, including the Operator’s backups, if it is still unpaid 30 days after a final notice given once it has been paused for 90 days. Backups a school has saved to its own storage are the school’s and are not affected.

8. Your rights

Under the NDPA you may ask to see the personal information held about you or your child, have it corrected, have it deleted or its use restricted where the law allows, object to its use, receive it in a portable format, and withdraw consent at any time (this does not affect earlier use). You will not be charged for a reasonable request, and the school will reply within one month.

Send requests to your school. The Operator will help the school answer them.

9. Data breaches

If a breach is likely to put people’s rights at risk, the Operator will tell the school without delay, and the school (with the Operator’s help) will notify the Nigeria Data Protection Commission within 72 hours and inform the people affected where required.

10. Complaints

Please raise any concern with the school first, or with the Operator at the operator’s data protection contact. You also have the right to complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (ndpc.gov.ng).

11. Starting a free trial or contacting us

When a school starts a free trial or sends us a request (for the founding setup plan, a quote, or to register interest), the platform operator, which runs Belloft, is responsible for the details given: the school’s name, country, town, how it runs and its approximate number of students, and the contact person’s name, role, phone number and email address.

We use these details to create the trial school, to reply to the request, and to agree and provide the Service: steps taken at the school’s request before a contract, and our legitimate interest in answering enquiries. Requests are kept for up to 12 months after they are made and then deleted; you may ask us to delete yours sooner. A trial school that ends without a plan is deleted as described in our Terms of Service.

To protect sign-up and request forms from automated abuse, we keep a one-way fingerprint of the network address used (never the address itself) for up to 7 days. If our bot check is switched on, Cloudflare checks that the form is used by a person, under its own privacy policy; it does not receive the details typed into the form.

12. When a school pays for Belloft

Schools pay the Operator through Paystack, which processes card and bank payments under its own privacy policy. Paystack tells us that a payment succeeded, its amount, date and reference, and the email address the payer used. If the school chooses to save a card for automatic renewal, we also keep the card type, its last four digits and an encrypted token that lets Paystack charge it; the full card number is never sent to us. We keep invoices, payments and receipts for as long as the law requires for accounting (normally six years), even after a school stops using Belloft.

13. Changes

This notice was last updated on 13 October 2026 (revised: paying online, automatic renewal, late payment, deletion, and the “Powered by Belloft” notice). Changes will be shown here with a new date.