School Buddy

Privacy at School Buddy

School Buddy is in a small private pilot. This page says plainly what it does with your information. A full privacy notice will be published before it opens to everyone.

What we keep

Your first name and email address. Your children's first names or nicknames, their school and year group. If you add them, their clubs and timetables. We never ask for surnames, birth dates, photos, or anything about health or needs.

Your email

One parent's email is connected per family, Gmail or Outlook (Hotmail and Outlook.com), usually the parent the schools write to first. If you connect it, School Buddy can read your email, but it only ever reads emails from your children's schools. It never sends, changes or deletes anything in your inbox. You can disconnect at any time from your account page, and we delete our access straight away.

With Gmail, School Buddy asks Google only for emails from the schools. With Outlook, Microsoft cannot be asked that way, so School Buddy looks at who sent your recent emails to find the schools' ones; it keeps nothing about any other email, not even who sent it.

School Buddy also reads school emails your family's parents forward to the connected account. It opens an email from one of your family's parents only when its subject says it is a forward (for example "Fwd:" or "FW:"), and keeps it only when the forwarded part names one of your children's schools as the sender; any other email is dropped at once and nothing about it is kept.

School Buddy's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

ClassCharts, if you connect it

ClassCharts has no official way to connect, so School Buddy keeps your ClassCharts email and password, encrypted with your family's own key, and uses them only on our server to log in and read homework, announcements and the timetable (subjects and times, never rooms or teachers), every 30 minutes in the day. It never reads behaviour, detentions or attendance. Disconnect at any time from your account page and the password is deleted at once.

How school emails are read

Each school email, with the text of its PDF attachments, is read by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to work out what you need to do. It runs on Anthropic's servers in the United States, under terms that do not let them use it for training. It sees one email at a time and your children's year groups, never their names. Letters about one child's health, needs or welfare are not summarised: you are told only that there is a private letter to open.

Your school year

Term dates, the weekly routine (what to wear and bring each day) and clubs found in school letters, and the timetable from ClassCharts, are only ever suggestions. Nothing is used until you tap Use it.

How it is protected

Names, email addresses, clubs, timetables, school emails and your email access are encrypted with your family's own key. Which school and year group each child is in is kept readable, so the app can match letters to them. Nobody at School Buddy reads your family's emails.

If you sign in with Face ID or a fingerprint, that check happens on your phone. School Buddy never receives your face, fingerprint or any other biometric, only a key your phone makes for School Buddy, which cannot be used to sign in anywhere else. You can remove it from Settings at any time.

We keep a school email only as long as it is useful for the job it created. Automatic deletion after 90 days is being switched on during the pilot.

Children

School Buddy is for parents and carers aged 18 or over. A child never signs up: a parent adds a child's own device, agreeing first that they are the child's parent or carer, and we record that agreement. On it, the child sees only their own jobs, bag and dates, can tick them, and is told that their parents can see what they tick. We keep no child's email, surname, birth date or photo. A parent can sign a child's device out at any time.

Reminders

A parent can ask School Buddy to email a reminder about a job, to themselves, the other parent, or someone outside the family such as a grandparent. We keep that person's email address and name, encrypted with your family's key. We email them once to ask, and send them nothing unless they say yes; every reminder has a link to stop them, and a parent can remove them at any time. They only ever get the reminder: the job, its date and its details.

Reporting a mistake

When you report a mistake, we keep what you chose and any note you write, encrypted, for six months. Nobody at School Buddy reads your school letters, unless you tick to let us look at the one behind your report to fix it. That lasts 30 days or until you stop it in Settings, and Settings shows each time we looked. A private letter, about one child's health, needs or welfare, is never shared this way.

The waiting list

If you join the waiting list on our home page, we keep your email address (encrypted), your school and how many children you have, only to invite you to the pilot. A request you do not confirm from the emailed link is deleted after 2 days; the list itself after 6 months, or as soon as you leave it from the link in our email. We send nothing else.

Leaving

You can delete your family from your account page at any time. Copies can remain in our backups until those backups expire.

Questions, or want your data: email support@sbuddy.co.uk.