Welcome to OurNews

OurNews is a storytelling platform. It gives schools a dedicated place to collect and share the stories of your school, with visibility controls that reduce the risks associated with communicating publicly.

To see OurNews itself in action, visit ournews.school. We’ll keep this updated as we are building through August.

What we’re setting out to solve

• School newsletters that take many hours to gather content for, write, design, and send.
• School communications that are hard to read and inaccessible (like PDF newsletters).
• Responding to the changing regulatory, cultural and risk landscape around the sharing of sensitive staff and student information online, especially on social media.
• Responding to the changing ways that parents consume information and connect with their school community.

How it works

• Stories flow into a central hub via a link your school shares with contributors.
• The coordinator opens the hub, writes or edits the story, and tags it.
• Every story carries a visibility setting: public and shareable by anyone, gated so photos and names are withheld until a reader hands over an email address, or link-only so the story only opens for someone who arrives through your school’s own link. None of these require a parent login.
• The layout and design of each story is automatically curated by the platform in adherence to a set of professionally designed, responsive templates.
• Once a story is ready, it may be published directly to the feed or curated into a collection, such as a newsletter.

What makes OurNews unique

Visibility controls

We set out to build controls that borrow from the cybersecurity playbook, reducing attack surface, to give schools a way to meaningfully reduce the risk of attack or abuse of sensitive information, without having to exclude important community connections from good-news stories (such as future prospective families and grandparents).

Storytelling culture

As our co-founder, Jacob Shultz from Bolsta Education, regularly speaks about: building a storytelling culture in a school community is an important component of creating belonging, connection and long-term stability. OurNews is built to be the central hub of this culture.

No integrations

We’re acutely aware of ‘platform-fatigue’ in schools. We want to do all we can to reduce the interdependence of platforms, instead seeing ourselves as ‘a layer on top’ of your core ICT infrastructure. So much so that we have taken a no-integration policy: OurNews should always be able to perform its core function extremely well, without relying on integrations.

Becoming a founding school

What it is

In September–November 2026, we’re opening access to OurNews to a small group of founding schools in our Pilot Program.

Timeline

Price

AUD$1,500 / USD$1,050 / €900

Covers the pilot and your school’s first full year. After year one, the following two years will be at half price.

What we offer to founding schools

• A working product from day one.
• Your old newsletters uploaded as archives.

Three two-hour workshops with the other founding schools and industry experts:

• Reducing reliance on social media in your comms strategy and enrolment journey
• Keeping your school cyber-safe (with Trent Ray from the Cyber Safety Project)
• Creating a storytelling culture (with YELLOW CAR)

• Direct email support access to the OurNews team.
• Founding-member pricing.
• No lock-in.

What we ask from founding schools

• Use/trial OurNews across the length of the program (internal use recommended to begin with)
• Attend the three workshops
• Answer a few short questionnaires, and give a short testimonial at the end.

We’re not asking you to stop your current newsletter or social media, or to decide about switching systems during the pilot.

Our approach to Privacy, Safety & Security

OurNews’s core approach is to reduce attack surface area: what information is held or exposed in the first place, the quantity of sensitive information, how many people can see it, and how many systems it connects to.

We’ve taken inspiration from the Five Safes model, the framework behind the UK’s Office for National Statistics and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, alongside the Australian Privacy Principles and the Privacy Act.

Visibility controls

• Public. A normal article, readable and shareable by anyone.
• Gated. The story’s text is public, but photos and names are withheld until a reader confirms an email address with a one-time code. Every reveal is logged, and a faint corner stamp carrying the viewer’s own email sits on the photo, so sharing is traceable.
• Link-only. The story doesn’t appear on any public page and opens only for someone who arrives through your school’s own link. Photos and names still need the same email check.
• None of these require a parent login or account.

Reducing risk

OurNews aims to reduce your school’s public communications risk from high to low. We use several layers of friction to reduce the risk of both opportunistic misuse and automated, large-scale scraping:

• Visibility setting itself (Public / Gated / Link-only), using an email-plus-one-time-code mechanism.
• Server-side gating of sensitive information: withheld content is never sent to an anonymous request in the first place.
• Standing link and rotation for Link-only stories, possession-gated and rotating on a schedule.
• Images are delivered via a URL that only delivers an image if the visibility setting allows.
• A visible corner stamp on revealed photos, carrying the viewer’s own identifier.
• Reveal-event logging.
• Right-click / save disabled at Gated and Link-only. Left on at Public, where sharing is the point.
• Bot and crawler protection.
• Malware scanning and sandboxed rendering on upload, protecting the platform itself from a malicious file.
• Encryption, access control and infrastructure

Encryption and data residency

• Content is encrypted at rest and in transit.
• Data is held in the region you choose at signup: Australia, the EU, the UK, the US or Singapore.
• Access control on media. No photo has a raw, public storage link. Every image is served through OurNews’s own access-controlled route, which checks the story’s visibility setting on every request.
• The content-delivery cache respects visibility settings: only Public content is ever cached externally. Gated and Link-only content is served fresh on every request and never cached.

Internal and support access

• Support access to a school’s data, when our team needs to look at something, runs through a single, logged, MFA-protected path.

Underlying infrastructure

• Supabase (database)
• AWS (media storage, email and malware scanning)
• Vercel (application hosting)
• Sentry (error monitoring)
• Cloudflare provides bot protection.

Security certifications

• OurNews is built to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles, and with GDPR for our EU and international schools.
• OurNews doesn’t hold a product-level certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 yet. We’re building toward independent verification of our security practices. Many of the practices these certifications assess already shape how we are developing OurNews: encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access with MFA, automated tenant-isolation checks on every deploy, and a documented review of every vendor who touches your data to name a few.
• We have committed to beginning the Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) assessment during the founding pilot, with the goal of holding it at public launch. ST4S is the accreditation most commonly asked for by Australian and New Zealand schools, run by Education Services Australia on behalf of the state, territory, Catholic and independent sectors.
• Our position in the meantime is to minimise what we hold: no student database, no parent database, no class lists. The personal information we do hold, published photos and stories, is the same kind of content your school already publishes on its own website. We hold it under more safeguards than a typical website would.
• We treat certification as an ongoing commitment, and expect to pursue further certification as OurNews grows.

Data processing and handling

• We only store what your school publishes, and a small log of who revealed withheld content and when.
• We don’t hold parent logins, student ID numbers, enrolment records or biometrics.
• Your school stays the owner and controller of everything it publishes; OurNews acts as the processor. For the small reveal log, OurNews is the controller, and it’s minimised and time-bounded.
• A takedown removes an image from the live system immediately, because every image is filed against the story it belongs to and is easy to find.
• Every upload is scanned for malware before it becomes visible to anyone, and validated by its file content, not extension.
• PDFs are rendered in an isolated, sandboxed process with no network access.
• Our data processing terms and the services we rely on are published on our trust centre.

Integrations

There are none.

Continuity

• You can export everything your school has published at any time, in an open format, without needing to ask us.
• If your school’s account ends, you have 30 days to pull a final export before content is removed from the live system, with erasure completing across live and backup systems shortly after.
• If we were ever to decide not to continue OurNews, we’ve committed to telling schools in writing, keeping the service running through a wind-down period, and supporting every school to export its content.

Incident response

• If we become aware of a breach affecting your content, we’ll inform you with what we know at the time, and keep you updated as we learn more.
• We’ll help your school meet its own obligations under your local regulation, such as Australia’s Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
• We’ll tell you before making any public statement about a breach affecting your content, unless the law requires otherwise.

Common questions