This procedure covers how a school asks Reason Education for access to, correction of, deletion of, or a full export of the personal information we hold on its behalf — what it costs, how long it takes, and what actually arrives.
The short version
1.1Every request in this procedure is free of charge and answered within 30 days. There is no fee, there is no fee for a large request, and there is no fee for a repeated one. A charge for access is a charge for exercising a right, and it would also give us a reason to be slow.
1.2Thirty days is our commitment. It is well inside the three months an assessment asks about, and it is chosen so that a request made at the start of a term is answered inside that term.
Who can ask us, and who should ask the school
Parents, carers and students: ask the school, not us
We do not hold a relationship with a parent, carer or student, we cannot verify who they are, and the school holds the context we do not. If you are a parent, carer or student, the school is the right place to ask. If you contact us anyway, we reply within two business days, say that plainly and courteously, tell you the school is the right place to ask, and tell the school that we did so.
2.1The school is our customer, and the school controls the student data in the service. Who may ask us, and about what, follows from that.
2.2A school. Through its nominated administrative contact, its principal, or a privacy officer it names, a school can make any request in this procedure, about any data in its own tenancy.
2.3A teacher or other staff user. They can ask us directly about their own account: their name, email address, login history, and the audit record of their own actions.
2.4A parent, carer or student. They should ask the school, for the reasons in the box above.
2.5We do not make the school's decisions for it. We do not decide for a school what it must give a family, and we do not tell a school whether it needs parental consent for anything. Both are the school's determination under its own policy and its department's guidance. Our job is to give the school everything it needs to make that determination and to act on it — which is what sections 5 and 6 exist for.
How to make a request
3.1Email us. Email policies@reasoneducation.com.au and we will confirm it in writing. Say which of the four you want — access, correction, deletion, or export — and the scope: the whole school, a class, a named student, or a staff account.
3.2A request does not have to use the right words. If a school emails support asking for “everything you have on Year 3”, that is an access request and it is treated as one from the day it arrived, not from the day someone recognised what it was.
3.3Everyone here is briefed to pass it on. Every founder forwards anything that might be a privacy request to the Privacy Officer the same day.
Identity verification
4.1We confirm who is asking before we act. We check that the requester is who they say they are and is entitled to the scope asked for. For a school request, that means the request comes from a contact recorded on the agreement, or is confirmed by one — a phone call to the school's published number, not a reply to the email address that made the request.
4.2Verification does not stop the clock. Day one is the day the request arrives.
4.3We ask for the minimum needed to verify. We do not require identity documents to answer a request about data we already hold, because collecting a driver's licence to answer a privacy request means the request has cost the person more privacy than it returned.
Access and export — what arrives
5.1An access request and an export request produce the same package. There is no reduced version. The format is a reusable one, and specifically the following.
5.2One CSV per table. UTF-8, with a header row of real column names.
- students.csv
- enrolments.csv
- submission_answers.csv
- student_standards.csv
- student_standards_history.csv
- assessment_runs.csv
- run_students.csv
- assessment_questions.csv
- diagnostics.csv
- student_badges.csv
- ai_reports.csv
- school_accounts.csv — no password hashes, no TOTP secrets
- audit_logs.csv
- mail_log.csv
5.3The working-out image as a file per answer. Decoded from the stored base64 to real PNG, under working_out/, named <run_id>-<student_number>-<question_id>.png. A base64 blob inside a CSV cell is not a reusable form; it is our storage format leaking into someone else's problem.
5.4working_out/manifest.csv. It maps every image filename to its answer ID, student, run, question and mark, so the images are usable without reverse-engineering the filename.
5.5README.txt. What each file is, what each column means, and where the numbers came from.
5.6provenance.csv. For every evaluative statement, whether it was computed from marks, is a model's unchecked reading, or is a teacher's decision. The export carries the same source labelling the product does. A judgement that arrives in a spreadsheet with its provenance stripped is a judgement that can be misread by whoever opens it next.
5.7Delivered as a single zip. Through a link that expires in 7 days and requires the recipient to be signed in to the staff portal. We do not email school data as an attachment.
5.8Cost: none, ever. Timeframe: 10 business days from verification for an export, inside the 30-day commitment in section 1. A whole-school export at the end of a year is a large job, and 10 days is what we will hold to; if it is going to take longer we say so before day 10, not after.
Correction
6.1Most corrections need no request at all. A school can correct anything it can see, and most of it without asking us: student names, year levels, class membership and curriculum judgements are all editable in the staff portal by a teacher or school administrator. Every edit is written to the audit log with who made it.
6.2For anything not editable in the portal — a student number, a school name, a staff email address — email policies@reasoneducation.com.au. Within 10 business days.
6.3Two things we will not do.
- We do not alter a submitted answer or a working-out image, because it is a record of what a child actually did and editing it destroys the only evidence behind a judgement. If it is wrong, the assessment run can be voided and re-run, and that is recorded.
- We do not delete an audit log entry, for the same reason in a different form.
Where a school says a record is inaccurate and we cannot alter it, we attach the school's statement to the record so anyone reading it reads the disagreement too.
Deletion
7.1Deletion is handled under our Retention and Deletion Schedule, which sets the timeframes and the certificate. In summary: live data removed within 30 days, certificate issued automatically within 5 business days of completion, backups aged out within a further 100 days.
7.2We do not promise deletion to a parent. If a parent asks us to delete a child's records, we tell the school. The school instructs us. This is not us hiding behind the school — it is that a deletion instruction about a child's school records is the school's to give, and a service that accepts them from anyone who emails is a service with a data loss problem.
7.3A deletion may remove evidence a school needs. Deleting a student removes the working-out images and answers behind that student's curriculum judgements. We say so in the acknowledgement, before we act, so the school can export first.
Timeframes, in one table
| Stage | Commitment |
|---|---|
| Acknowledge any request | 2 business days |
| Reply to a parent or student redirecting them to the school | 2 business days |
| Correction | 10 business days |
| Access or export package delivered | 10 business days from verification |
| Deletion completed in the live service | 30 days |
| Deletion certificate | 5 business days after completion |
| Any request, start to finish | 30 days |
| If we cannot meet 30 days | We say so before day 30, with a reason and a date. Never after. |
Refusing a request
10.1We can refuse only where the law allows it, and we have to say so in writing with the reason and what the school can do next.
10.2The realistic grounds here are narrow.
- A request from someone we cannot verify.
- A request for data belonging to a different school.
- A request to alter submitted work or an audit record (section 6).
- A request whose scope we cannot identify after asking.
“It would take a while” is not a ground. Nor is “we do not have a tool for that” — that is our problem to solve inside the 30 days.
10.3A school that is unhappy with our answer can escalate. To the Privacy Officer, and from there to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. We say this in the refusal itself rather than waiting to be asked.
Records
11.1Every request is logged, whether or not we acted on it. Date received, requester, school, type, scope, verification method, date completed, what was provided, who did it, and who checked it.
11.2The register is reviewed at the Privacy Officer's quarterly review, looking for two things — a request that ran past its commitment, and a request type we keep receiving that should have been self-service by now.
| Date | School | Type | Scope | Completed | Days | By |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — | No requests received. No customer schools exist. |
Contact and escalation
| Privacy Officer | Jake Gatto, Founder and CEO |
|---|---|
| policies@reasoneducation.com.au | |
| Entity | Reason Education |
| Support and complaints | Support and Complaints — every channel, who owns it, and how fast we answer |
| External escalation | Office of the Australian Information Commissioner |
| Related documents | Privacy Policy · Collection Notice |
Version history
- 1.0First issue. Signed by Jake Gatto, Founder and CEO, Privacy Officer; countersigned by Jacob Clemens, Founder and CTO, Security Officer. Next review 18 August 2027.