Trust Centre

No. You’re not locked in. You can take OurNews month to month or a year at a time, and cancel at any time by writing to us with no cancellation fee. There’s no proprietary format holding your work either: you can export everything at any point in an open format, each story a plain markdown file with its attachments bundled with it.

If we ever decide not to keep building OurNews, we will tell you in writing. You can export your content, and we keep the service running through a generous wind-down period (90 days minimum). Data exported from OurNews is a usable archive, with one folder per story, each written as a plain markdown file with its attachments bundled alongside. Because it is plain files rather than a proprietary format, you always have something you can open, read and move elsewhere, whatever happens to OurNews.

Your school does. Everything you upload or create in OurNews stays your property, and OurNews claims no ownership of it. We hold a licence only as far as we need to run the service for you, and it ends when the content is deleted or the agreement or subscription ends. We do not use your content for our own purposes: no reuse in marketing without your written permission, and no use of it to train any AI model.

You can cancel at any time by writing to us. No reason is needed and no cancellation fee applies. Anything you have paid beyond that date is refunded pro rata, apart from founding schools’ first-year fee, which is paid up front and covers the full first 12 months. On the date you name, your public pages come down and you have 30 days to take a final export. After that we delete your content from the live service, it is purged from backups within 7 days, and we confirm the deletion in writing if you ask.

OurNews is an external communications platform. That makes it built on different, complementary principles to your student management system. Many systems have communication modules, and we see these as integral to your school communications strategy. Keep using them.

At the same time, these systems work because they are behind a parent login, which makes them incapable of external communication like you might typically post on social media.

OurNews is purpose-built for one job: gathering a school’s stories and publishing them. What makes OurNews particularly valuable is its Visibility and Access controls. This makes OurNews an excellent alternative to social media, as many schools wind down their dependence on it as a primary form of communication. Public communication, made safer.

Social media gives you easy reach in exchange for giving up control. It is a double-edged sword: a photo of a student on a school Facebook or Instagram page sits on a platform you do not own, open to anyone, downloadable, and hard to ever fully remove. OurNews gives you the reach without that exposure. You choose per story who can find it and who can read it. A story that asks for an email shows a stranger its title and summary only. To read the rest, they sign the visitors’ book with an email address. A story set to Magic Link shows only to people who came in through your school’s Magic Link.

Stories on OurNews also benefit from smart development and architectural decisions: no-index, bot protection, malware protection, region-based storage, backups, plus an access log of everyone who signed the visitors’ book.

For a lot of leaders this is the reason they come to OurNews: telling the school’s story without putting students on an open platform.

Your school is responsible for what it publishes: that it is accurate, that you have the right to publish it, and that it meets the privacy, consent and child-safety rules that apply to you. For every image of a person, your school must hold the consent the law requires. Your school also warrants that its own collection notice covers publication through a third-party platform such as OurNews. If you need to remove an image or story, it is easy to delete from the OurNews platform.

During our Pilot Program, we do not have a service level agreement. However, we use reasonable efforts to keep OurNews available and will tell you in advance about any planned downtime. We expect to introduce a formal service level agreement when OurNews moves to general availability in early 2027, issued as a new version of the Standard Terms under clause 1.4. Live platform status is shown on our public status page at status.ournews.school.

We’ve intentionally built OurNews to be an easy ‘yes’ from ICT. There is nothing to connect or integrate for OurNews to work. OurNews doesn’t touch your student information system, holds no class lists, parent logins or other sensitive data. Your data is held on servers located in your region, and you can request deletion at any time. We’ve built OurNews to meet strict data security and privacy requirements. We’re happy to share technical information with ICT teams to answer any questions. You can also share with them the detailed policies on this page.

We are available directly via email. We aim to respond within 3 business days. You can remove your own stories and photos at any time in OurNews. If you need us to remove something, we act as soon as we reasonably can and aim to do it within 2 business days.