# OurNews

> OurNews is a school newsletter platform. Teachers contribute stories in a couple of
> taps, the platform handles the layout, and the school decides who can see each story.
> OurNews was previously called OurNewsletter; it is the same product with a shorter
> name. It is made by Bolsta Education.

## What it is, and what it is not

OurNews is a school newsletter and storytelling layer that sits on top of whatever a
school already runs. It is not a student information system, not a communications
platform, and not an email marketing tool. It does not connect to a school's student
information system, so there is no student database to sync and nothing to integrate.
Schools keep Compass, Schoolbox or Veracross and run OurNews alongside them.

## Who it is for

Schools with a communications coordinator or marketing manager, often part-time, who
assembles the school newsletter. Independent and international schools over-index.
Readers are parents, extended family and prospective families, reached by a web link
they can bookmark rather than a login-gated app. There is no parent login.

## How a school newsletter gets made

The product runs in four steps.

1. **Gather.** Stories arrive on their own. Anyone can submit one: a teacher through the
   web app or by email, a QR code in the staffroom, an import from the school calendar
   or social media. Every submission lands in the Story Hub, ready to shape. Submitting
   takes about two minutes from a phone, with no login.
2. **Grow.** Shape each submission into a story rather than starting from a blank page.
   Write as much or as little as you like; the contributor's original wording is
   preserved.
3. **Curate.** Choose, don't design. Pick the stories, pick a layout from a small set
   that always works, drop them in. The edition assembles itself.
4. **Publish.** Mobile-first, filterable by grade and subject, so a family can read only
   what concerns their own child.

Publishing works two ways, and a school can use both. Stories can be curated into an
assembled newsletter edition, or published one at a time to a continuous feed with no
edition boundary. Each story is a self-contained item with its own link, so a
compilation such as a term in review is a selection of stories that already exist rather
than a rewrite. Schools can export their content at any time.

## Visibility controls

The central idea: risk is a dial, not a switch. Most schools have the dial turned all
the way up by default, because the only two options usually on offer are to keep posting
publicly and carry the risk, or to stop publishing. OurNews puts settings in between.
The school sets the level per story, and can change it whenever it likes.

**Public.** Turned all the way up. A normal article, readable and shareable by anyone on
the internet, and findable in search if the school turns that on.

**Gated.** Turned down a little. The story is readable by anyone, but photos and names
are hidden until the reader gives an email address and verifies it with a one-time code.
That access is logged, and the reader's name marks each revealed photo.

**Link-only.** Turned all the way down. The entire story is hidden. Only people who
arrive via a specific URL can view it. The school holds the URL and can change it on a
regular schedule. Photos and names still need the same email check.

### How they work

On the gated and link-only levels, photos and names are withheld at the server level, so
they are not in the page a bot or scraper receives. Reveal events are logged, and a
revealed photo carries the viewer's identifier, so onward sharing is traceable to whoever
opened it. Search indexing is off by default. The closed level gates the whole
publication behind a link the school distributes through its own channel, so OurNews
holds no parent roster and no student data. Where a child is being protected from a
family member, that link can simply be withheld.

### Why a dial is the right model

In the documented Australian cases of school image misuse, the person responsible was an
insider: a student of the same school, known to the victims, often unaware they were
breaking the law. What deters impulsive wrongdoing is the perceived certainty of being
identified, not an unbreakable lock. The model is a front-door camera. It changes
behaviour when people know they have been seen and logged, and it makes the one who
tries anyway identifiable. That is a different job from a vault, and it is the job that
matches the actual threat.

The tiers are modelled on the Five Safes framework used by the Australian Bureau of
Statistics, and they map to three audiences rather than three settings on one audience:
the world, the whole community including its loose edges, and a specific bounded group.

### The honest limits

Nothing on a screen can be made un-copyable. If a photo can be seen, it can be captured.
What a school can control is the audience, the searchability, and whether its images sit
on a platform engineered to be scraped. This is risk reduction and accountability, high
to low. It is not a vault, and it does not replace a school's social media, though it
does reduce how much a school has to rely on it. The schools that handle this well will
have made deliberate choices and be able to show their reasoning.

## Status

OurNews is in active development. A ten-week founding pilot runs from September 2026.

## Pages

- [Home](https://ournews.school/): what OurNews does, and the steps of making a school newsletter.
- [Founding pilot](https://ournews.school/pilot): what the pilot involves, what founding schools receive, and the questions schools ask.
- [Student image exposure](https://ournews.school/ai-images): a brief for schools on what changed in 2026, the risk to student images online, and the three visibility levels in plain language.
- [Privacy](https://ournews.school/privacy): what is collected when you open the demo, and why.