Terms of service

1 Who this agreement is between

These terms are the agreement between THE CREATIVE CLAN GROUP LTD, registered under 13472488 in England and Wales, with its registered office at 3 Bakehouse Mews, Hampton, England, TW12 2NL, and the school or the teacher who uses Bhala. We say we and us for the company, and you for the school or teacher.

Bhala is built and supported from the United Kingdom. Our customers are South African schools, so these terms are written around South African law and around POPIA, the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013.

2 What Bhala is

Bhala is a class markbook for primary schools, used in a web browser at app.usebhala.app. It holds marks, notes, pastoral ratings, and, for the two roles allowed to open them, sensitive records such as medical information, learning support and concessions.

Bhala does not write about a child. A report draft is assembled from your school's own phrase bank, on our own servers, and a teacher reads it and approves it before it goes anywhere.

3 Accepting these terms

You accept these terms when you sign up, when you accept a quote that refers to them, or when your staff use Bhala. If you accept them for a school, you confirm you are allowed to bind that school.

Accepting them also creates the written contract that section 21 of POPIA requires between a responsible party and its operator. That contract is the Schedule at the end of this page, and it is part of these terms.

These terms take effect on 3 September 2026.

4 Who may use Bhala

Bhala is for the adults who work in a school. Pupils do not get logins and neither do parents. A family may be given a PIN for one pupil, which shows only what that pupil's teacher has ticked.

If you sign up on the Just me plan you confirm three things: that your school knows you are using Bhala, that you are permitted to record its pupils' information in it, and that your school, not you, remains the responsible party for that information under POPIA.

A single-teacher account on the Just me plan is its own school inside Bhala, separate from any other school already using Bhala. If that account buys seats through checkout, it moves onto the school plan automatically. Moving back from the school plan to a single-teacher account is not automatic, so talk to us first if that is what you need.

5 Accounts and logins

• Give us accurate information when you sign up, and keep it current.
• One login belongs to one person. Logins are not shared, not passed on and not used by a colleague who has one of her own.
• Keep your password to yourself. If you think somebody else has it, tell us at once.
• You are responsible for what is done under your school's logins, including by anybody you invite.
• Tell us or remove the login when a member of staff leaves. We may remove a login ourselves where we have good reason.

6 What you may not do

You may not:

• put information into Bhala that you are not authorised to hold;
• put real information about a real child into the demo school;
• share a login, or let anybody use Bhala who is not entitled to;
• scrape Bhala, copy it in bulk, or point automated tools at it;
• try to get around the access rules, the encryption or the log, or reach another school's records;
• resell Bhala, or use it to run a service for another organisation;
• upload anything malicious or unlawful.

If you find a way around one of the guards, please tell us at [email protected] rather than using it. We will thank you and fix it.

7 The demo school

The demo school is free, open to anybody and provided for evaluation. Every pupil in it is fictional. It is reset from time to time and may be reset at any moment without notice, so anything entered there will be lost.

Do not put real information about a real child into the demo school. It is provided as it is, with no promises of any kind, and the liability clause below applies to it in full.

8 Plans, prices and seats

There are two plans. The school plan is bought by the school and priced per seat per month. The Just me plan is for one teacher at a flat monthly price. What each plan includes is set out on our pricing page.

Prices are shown in rand, on that page or in the quote we send you, and the price that applies is the one shown when you sign up. If any tax applies to your invoice, it is shown on the invoice.

We invoice in rand. Payments are taken by Stripe and settled in pounds by our UK company. The rand figure on your invoice is what you pay.

The Just me plan gives one teacher one staff account and one class in the current academic year. Inviting a second person is refused with a plain message, and Class Builder is unavailable, also shown as a plain message rather than an error. Everything else in Bhala, including marks, notes, reports, sharing with parents and importing a class list, works exactly as it does on the school plan.

On the school plan, staff accounts are capped at the seats your school has bought through checkout, and Class Builder is available. Disabling a staff account frees the seat it held, so you can hand it to somebody else without buying another.

9 The free first term

A new Just me subscription starts with a free first term. The length of the free period is shown at the checkout before you enter a card, and we take nothing before it ends. Cancel before it ends and you pay nothing at all.

Card details are handled by Stripe. We never see your card number and we do not hold it.

10 Paying, and what happens if you do not

School invoices are payable within 30 days of the invoice date unless we have agreed something else in writing. A Just me subscription is charged monthly by Stripe.

Bhala does not cut off access when an invoice goes unpaid. Nothing in the product changes and no record is hidden, because nothing in the software looks at whether you have paid. If an invoice is overdue we will contact your school and ask. If it stays unpaid we may suspend access, after giving at least 14 days' written notice, and we may charge interest on the overdue amount at the rate prescribed by law.

We will not delete anything because an invoice is unpaid.

11 Cancelling

You may cancel at any time by writing to [email protected]. There is no cancellation screen in the product yet, so email is the way to do it, and we will confirm in writing.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have paid for. We do not refund part of a month unless the law requires it, and nothing here takes away a right you have to cancel under the Consumer Protection Act, 2008.

12 Your records belong to your school

Everything your school puts into Bhala stays your school's: pupils, marks, notes, phrase banks, the lot. You give us permission to hold and process it only as far as we need to in order to run the service for you, keep it secure and back it up. That permission ends when the agreement does, apart from what we need in order to hand your records back and then delete them.

We do not sell your records. We do not use them for advertising, to build features for anybody else, or to train any model. We do look at information about how the product is used, such as error reports and page counts, which does not identify a pupil.

13 Personal information, and our two roles

Your school is the responsible party for the personal information of its pupils, their families and its staff. We are your operator: we process that information on your instructions, to provide Bhala, and for nothing else. The Schedule below sets out the operator terms in full.

You confirm that you have a lawful basis for what you put into Bhala, including the special personal information of children, such as health information, and that you have given the notices POPIA requires. Deciding what may be recorded about a child is your school's call, not ours.

We are the responsible party for a small amount of information of our own: the names and work addresses of the staff who hold accounts, and our billing records.

14 Nothing is deleted, and what that means for you

Bhala's records are append-only, and that is enforced by the database rather than by a setting. A correction is written beside the original instead of replacing it, so a mark keeps its history. Neither your staff nor we can quietly change it.

The consequence is honest rather than convenient: we cannot make a record vanish on request in the ordinary run of things. Where information is wrong, we correct it in the way the system allows, which is to record the correction alongside what was there before. Where a record has to be destroyed to meet a legal obligation, write to us and we will do it by hand and confirm in writing what we did.

Retention limits are built in. Medical records default to five years after a pupil leaves and other records to seven, while academic history is kept permanently. A head can shorten a window; nobody can lengthen one or switch it off. There is no job that destroys records when a window is reached, so treat these as limits your school has set rather than as a promise that something has already been thrown away.

15 Getting a copy of your records

There is no download button in Bhala today, and we will not pretend otherwise. From inside the product you can print a pupil summary or a parent evening page, one pupil at a time.

While you are a customer, and for 90 days after the agreement ends, you may ask us for a copy of your school's records. We put it together by hand and send it within 30 days of the request, in a common machine readable format. The first copy in any twelve months is free; after that we may charge for the time it takes.

We keep your school's records for 90 days after the agreement ends so that you can ask. After that we may delete them, and we will delete them sooner if you ask us to in writing.

16 Security, and telling you when something goes wrong

We protect your records with the measures set out in the Schedule and described on our trust page. Sensitive records sit in their own encrypted store with their own key, and are kept out of shares, prints and reports.

If we have reasonable grounds to believe that anybody has reached your school's personal information without authorisation, we will tell you immediately, as section 21(2) of POPIA requires. We will tell you what we know, what we are doing about it, and keep you informed, so that your school can meet its own duty under section 22 to notify the Information Regulator and the people affected.

Your school decides whether and how to notify. We will not notify the Regulator or a parent on your behalf unless you ask us to in writing.

17 The companies that help us

A small number of companies handle school data on our behalf, each for one job, and one more is wired up and switched off. Who they are, what each one does and where it is are set out on our trust page, and that list is kept current.

We will email you at least 30 days before another one starts handling your school's data. If you object on reasonable data protection grounds and we cannot resolve it between us, you may cancel without penalty and we will refund any period you have paid for and not used.

18 What we promise, and what we do not

We will provide Bhala with reasonable skill and care, and we will fix faults as quickly as we reasonably can.

We do not promise a level of uptime. Bhala is young, and we would rather say that than print a number we cannot yet stand behind. We do not promise that the software is free of errors, or that it will suit a particular way of working. Beyond what these terms say, and beyond what the law does not allow us to exclude, Bhala is provided as it is.

Bhala needs a connection for reports, prints and sharing. Marks and notes entered without a signal are held on the device and sync when the signal returns.

19 What stays your school's job

Assessment is your school's professional judgement. Bhala surfaces figures and never diagnoses a child, never labels one, and never decides anything about one.

A teacher must read and approve every report, share and print before it reaches a parent. Drafts are assembled from your own phrase bank, and a draft is a draft.

You are responsible for who your school gives access to, for taking that access away when somebody leaves, and for the accuracy of what your staff enter.

20 What we are liable for

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. That includes your rights and our obligations under POPIA and under the Consumer Protection Act, 2008. Where any part of this clause conflicts with either Act, the Act wins and the rest of this clause carries on.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for a decision your school took using information it found in Bhala.

Subject to that, everything we owe you in connection with these terms, added together, is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose. Where you have paid us nothing, including anything to do with the demo school, we are liable only for what the law does not allow us to exclude.

21 Suspending or ending the agreement

We may suspend or end this agreement if an invoice stays unpaid after the notice described above, if Bhala is used in a way these terms forbid, or if the law requires it. Except in an emergency we will give you notice first and a fair chance to put it right.

We may also decide to stop offering Bhala. If we ever do, we will give you at least 90 days' notice, we will not charge you beyond that notice, and you may ask for a copy of your records in the usual way.

22 Changes to these terms and to Bhala

We may change these terms. We will email the address on your account. A change that materially affects you takes effect at least 30 days after that email; a small one, such as a correction, takes effect when we publish it.

Carrying on with Bhala after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept a material change, cancel before it takes effect and we will refund any period you have paid for and not used.

We may change the product itself, add to it and retire parts of it. We will not quietly remove a protection described on our trust page: if that ever has to change, we will tell you first.

23 Which law applies, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa. The courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute, and neither of us is prevented from bringing a matter in another court that has jurisdiction.

We chose South African law even though our company is in the United Kingdom, because your school, your pupils and their families are in South Africa, and because POPIA and the Consumer Protection Act apply to them whatever law a contract picks.

Nothing here takes away your right to complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa, to the National Consumer Commission, or to bring a matter under either Act.

Before anybody goes to court, please write to us at [email protected]. We answer in a day, in working hours, from a real person, and most things are settled that way.

24 The usual small print

• Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to [email protected]. An email counts as writing.
• These terms, the Schedule, and any quote or order we have both agreed are the whole agreement between us. Where a signed order and these terms disagree, the order wins on the point it covers.
• You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent. We may transfer it to a company that takes over the Bhala business, and we will tell you if we do.
• If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of these terms carry on without it.
• Not enforcing something once does not mean giving it up.
• Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control, although that does not excuse paying what is owed.
• Nobody other than you and us has rights under these terms.

25 How to reach us

Write to [email protected]. For anything about personal information, ask for Ross Walker, who handles data protection for Bhala. Our postal address is 3 Bakehouse Mews, Hampton, England, TW12 2NL.