SchoolSphereTerms
Terms of service
These terms cover schoolsphere.co, this public website, and the SchoolSphere application that school staff sign into. They also cover the public websites we host for schools. The school is our customer; the people who use the application do so on the school's behalf. By signing in, or by putting a school onto SchoolSphere, you agree to these terms.
What SchoolSphere is
SchoolSphere is school management software. A school gets its own separate space in the application, its own users, and, if it wants one, a public website on its own domain or on a subdomain of ours. What each school pays, and for which modules, is set out in the written quote we send after a demo. That quote and these terms together make up the agreement.
Accounts
A school's administrator invites staff by email and decides what each person can see and do. Each account is for one person. Do not share a login, and do not let someone else use yours. If you think your login has been used by someone else, change your password and tell your administrator straight away.
You can sign in with a password or with a Google account. Either way the account is tied to the email address your school invited. We record who did what in the application, when, and from which address, and that record cannot be edited by anyone, including us. Schools rely on it, so please treat your login accordingly.
What the school is responsible for
The school decides what goes into SchoolSphere and who has access to it. That includes the accuracy of the records it keeps, the permissions it grants, and what it publishes on its public website. Where a school collects information about students, families or staff and stores it in SchoolSphere, the school is the one responsible for having a proper basis to hold it. We process it on the school's instructions.
You may not use SchoolSphere to break the law, to attempt access to another school's space, to send unsolicited mail, or to probe or overload the service. We may suspend an account or a school while we deal with something of that kind, and we will tell the school's administrator when we do.
Payment
Subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly, as the quote states, and are due in advance. If a payment is late, the school keeps read-only access to everything for a grace period so that nobody is locked out of their own records on the day an invoice is missed. If the grace period passes without payment, the school is locked until it is settled. The grace period is currently ten days.
Prices are fixed for the term of the quote. If we change them at renewal, we will tell you before the renewal date so you can decide.
Your data
The school owns everything it puts into SchoolSphere. We do not sell it, we do not use it to advertise, and we do not look at it except to run the service, to fix a problem the school has asked us to look at, or where the law requires it.
Nothing in SchoolSphere is hard-deleted from the day-to-day screens. Transactions are voided rather than removed and a leaver's record is marked as withdrawn, because the audit trail depends on it. If a school needs something removed outright, ask us.
Your reports and records are yours to take. A school can export its own reports at any time while its subscription is active, and a school that has cancelled can still export them afterwards. Ask us and we will delete a school's space once it has taken what it needs.
What we collect from visitors to this website, and who processes it, is described in our privacy policy and cookie policy. Each school publishes its own privacy policy on its hosted website.
Availability
We aim to keep SchoolSphere up all the time, but we cannot promise that it will never go down. We will tell administrators about planned maintenance in advance where we can, and we schedule it outside the school's working hours where we can. Support hours and response times are stated in your quote.
Ending the agreement
A school can cancel at any time. The subscription runs to the end of the period already paid for, and we do not refund the unused part of a period unless the quote says otherwise. Cancelling does not remove the school's data on its own; see Your data above for how to take it with you and how to have it deleted.
We can end the agreement if the school breaks these terms and does not put it right after we have asked, or if payment remains outstanding after the grace period. Except where we have to act at once to protect the service or other schools, we will give notice first.
Limits on our liability
We are responsible for running SchoolSphere with reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for losses that come from the records a school chooses to enter, from decisions made on the basis of those records, from a school giving access to the wrong person, or from something outside our control such as an internet outage. Where the law lets us limit our liability, it is limited to the amount the school has paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit.
Changes
If we change these terms we will update the date at the top and tell each school's administrator by email before the change takes effect. If a change makes the agreement worse for a school, the school can cancel before it takes effect and we will refund any period paid for beyond that date.
Governing law
SchoolSphere is registered in Zimbabwe, and these terms are governed by the laws of Zimbabwe. If a dispute cannot be settled between us, the courts of Zimbabwe will decide it. Nothing in this section takes away protections a school has under the law of the country it is in.
Getting in touch
If you have a question about these terms, request a demo through our demo page and say so in the message, and we will reply to the address you give us.