Last updated: 31 July 2026 📅
Smart School Councils helps schools run a school council that every pupil takes part in. This notice explains what information we collect, why, and the choices you have. We are a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1156110, at The Gateway, 85 to 101 Sankey Street, Warrington, Cheshire, WA1 1SR, and we are the data controller for the information described below.
We are a small charity. To do our work we hold contact details for the teachers who lead the programme, and records of the class meetings their pupils hold. We do not publish pupil names, we do not sell data, and we do not use pupil contributions for advertising.
Greg Sanderson, Data Protection Lead
Smart School Councils, The Gateway, 85 to 101 Sankey Street, Warrington, Cheshire, WA1 1SR
greg@smartschoolcouncils.org.uk
When you visit our website we collect standard technical information such as pages viewed, approximate location derived from your IP address, browser and device type, and how you arrived at the site. We use:
Lawful basis: legitimate interests in understanding and improving our site, and in keeping it secure.
If you have given us your email address, for example by asking for our guide, and you then click a link in one of our emails, ActiveCampaign places a cookie on your browser. From that point it records which of our pages you visit and adds that to your record.
We use this to know when a school is looking at us again, so that a real person can follow up at a useful moment instead of emailing everybody, and to notice when a member school has stopped using the programme so we can offer help rather than wait for renewal.
It runs on our public website, our guide page, our demo and the member dashboard. It records which pages were visited and when, and nothing else. It does not read what is on the page, so no pupil's name, answer or comment is ever sent to ActiveCampaign by it.
If you would rather we did not do this, decline or clear cookies in your browser and it stops.
Lawful basis: legitimate interests in following up with a school that has already asked us about our programme.
When you ask for our free school council guide, book a demo, request a walkthrough or sign up for CPD, we collect your name, email address, school and role. We also store the Google click identifier if you arrived from an advert, so we can measure our advertising.
We hold this in ActiveCampaign, which we use to send you what you asked for and to follow up. It records whether you opened our emails and which links you clicked, so we can tell what is useful. You can unsubscribe from any email using the link in it.
Lawful basis: consent, and legitimate interests in following up with a school that asked about our programme.
If you enter your email address in the box in our footer, we add you to our mailing list in ActiveCampaign and send you pupil voice ideas, stories and event invitations. We do not need anything other than your email address. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and using it removes you straight away.
Lawful basis: consent.
For member schools we hold:
Lawful basis: contract, and legitimate interests in supporting the school.
When a class holds a class meeting, the teacher records the class's response to a question: the votes, the comments the class agreed to share, and the ideas and actions that came out of it. We hold that so the school can see its own pupil voice over time, and so we can report anonymised patterns across schools.
We do not publish pupil names. Where a teacher types a name into a comment, our system removes names before the record is stored, and the names of the pupils leading or note-taking in a meeting are never written to our database at all.
Contributions are recorded at class level, not against individual pupils. We do not build profiles of individual children, we do not use pupil contributions for advertising, and we do not sell them.
Every member school signs our Data Sharing Agreement, which sets out these terms. For schools in a local authority or trust cohort there is an addendum covering what the trust or authority can see, which is aggregate reporting for its own schools.
Lawful basis: the school is the data controller for pupil information and we act on its instructions. Our agreement with the school sets this out.
To turn a term of class meetings into something a school leader can read, we generate written summaries using an AI service provided by Anthropic, whose Claude models process the text on our instruction.
What is sent: the questions asked, how classes voted, and the comments and ideas pupils contributed, including short verbatim quotes so a summary can be backed up by what pupils actually said. Pupil names are removed before this happens, and the service is instructed to skip anything that still looks like a name.
What is not sent: contact details, staff details, or anything identifying an individual pupil.
Anthropic processes this only in order to return the summary to us, and does not use it to train its models.
Lawful basis: the school is the controller and we act on its instruction under our Data Sharing Agreement.
Cookies are small files a website puts on your device. We use them for three things: making the site work, understanding how it is used, and measuring our advertising. We show a short notice on your first visit pointing you to this page.
You can remove or block cookies at any time in your browser settings, and aboutcookies.org explains how to do that in each browser. You can also opt out of Google Analytics across all websites using Google's opt-out tool. Blocking non-essential cookies does not stop the site working.
We advertise on Google and on Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Those platforms set cookies to measure whether an advert led to someone requesting our guide or joining, and to show our adverts to people who look like our existing members. If you fill in a lead form on Facebook or Instagram, Meta passes those details to us so we can send you what you asked for.
Lawful basis: legitimate interests in measuring and improving our advertising, and consent where the law requires it.
| What | Who | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing website | Cloudflare | Global network, edge caching |
| Member application and forms | Hostinger | United Kingdom and EU |
| Database of members, meetings and questions | Supabase | United Kingdom, London |
| Payments | Chargebee | United States |
| Marketing email and CRM | ActiveCampaign | United States |
| Transactional email | Resend | United States |
| Analytics | Google Analytics, PostHog | Google is global. PostHog is in the EU |
| Advertising | Google, Meta | United States |
| Legacy member dashboard | Outlandish | Amazon Web Services, EEA |
| Written pupil voice summaries | Anthropic | United States |
| Donations | CAF | United Kingdom |
| Email to and from our team | Google Workspace | Global network |
Where a supplier is outside the UK we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or on the supplier's own approved transfer mechanism.
A school can ask us to delete its class meeting records at any time, and we will do so.
We are careful with information about children, because it is the point of what we do.
Our safeguarding policy explains this in more detail. If you are a parent or carer with a question about your child's school council, your school is the right first contact, and we will support them.
Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of the information we hold about you, correct it if it is wrong, delete it, restrict how we use it, or object to us using it. Where we rely on consent you can withdraw it at any time. Where we rely on legitimate interests you can object, and we will stop unless we have a compelling reason not to.
To make a request, email membership@smartschoolcouncils.org.uk or write to us at the address above. We will respond within one month.
When we receive a complaint we open a file containing the details, which normally includes the identity of the person complaining and anyone else involved. We use that information only to handle the complaint and to check the quality of our service. We publish statistics about complaints, but never in a form that identifies anyone.
We usually have to tell the person being complained about who has complained. If you would rather we did not, tell us and we will try to respect that, although it may not be possible to handle a complaint anonymously.
If you are not happy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, though we would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.
This notice covers our website and our member application. It does not cover other sites we link to, and we would encourage you to read their own privacy information.
We review this notice at least once a year, and whenever we change the systems we use. This version replaces the one dated 3 February 2024, which described an earlier setup.
Smart School Councils is a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1156110. 🙏