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Your school's data belongs to you

21 June 2026

The scene often plays out on a June morning. The accounts officer needs a family's payment history over three years to close a file. The software's export stops at the current year. The rest exists, somewhere on a server, but a ticket has to be opened, waited on, chased. The data is there; it is no longer within reach.

The same discovery is sometimes made at the worst possible moment: when the school is considering a change of tool. You ask for “all our data” and receive a partial export, in a format only the old software can read, with neither the attached documents nor the history of exchanges with families. Yet pupil files, marks, payments and class council decisions are the school's own property. A vendor hosts this data and keeps it working; it does not own it.

Four questions to ask before signing

Data governance does not require a law degree. It requires asking the right questions at the right moment — that is, before signature, while every answer can still be written into the contract.

• Where is the data hosted? An identifiable country, provider and legal framework. A vague answer on this point heralds others.
• Who has access to it? On the school's side: which roles see what, from the front office to senior leadership. On the vendor's side: who can view your data, in which circumstances, and with what audit trail.
• How do you get it back? At any time, in standard formats your teams know how to open: Excel or CSV for lists and entries, PDF for documents. An export that only opens in the software that produced it is not an export.
• What happens if the school leaves? Within what timeframe the data is returned, in which formats, and when it is deleted from the vendor's servers. This is the reversibility clause.

The last two questions also appear in a wider grid — who reads messages to families, what is included — set out in our guide to choosing school management software.

Reversibility is negotiated at the start, not at the end

The reason is simple: the balance of power reverses over time. Before signature, the vendor is trying to win you over and is happy to put its commitments in writing. At the end of the contract, it is the school that is asking, often under the pressure of a new school year to prepare, and every week of waiting translates into hours of re-keying.

A serious reversibility clause fits in a few lines: the scope returned (data, documents, histories), the formats, the timeframe, and the fate of the copies kept by the vendor. Ask to read it before you sign. A vendor that does its job well has no reason to refuse: its clients stay because the tool serves them, not because their data is retained.

Data that is useful every day, not only on departure

Ownership of data is not tested only on the day you leave. It is tested daily. A school that retrieves its information easily hands the morning register to the supervisor, sends the payments desk statement to the accountancy firm in its usual format, extracts the averages before the class council, and prepares the start-of-year lists without re-keying a single record. If each of these simple actions requires a request to the vendor, the governance question has already been settled — and not in your favour.

It is also a matter of continuity. Your current files, often spreadsheets built up patiently over the years, have real value. A well-designed school management system starts from that existing base: it imports your lists as they are at the outset, without replacing everything, and returns them as simply as it received them. The school remains in control of its data on the way in and on the way out, with no interruption of service during the school year.

At Scoliom, these commitments are written into the contract: identified hosting, logged access, exports in standard formats at any time, and a reversibility clause with the timeframe and scope set out in writing. If you are preparing a change of tool, or simply want to clarify where your data stands, it all starts with a remote assessment: a review of your current files and workflows, to establish what goes into the platform — and to confirm that all of it can come back out.