Last updated: 21 September 2026
The School Gallery is operated by JAM IT & Design Ltd ("JAM", "we", "us"). For most of the personal data described below, the school your child attends is the data controller – they decide why photos are taken and shared, and hold the underlying relationship with your family. JAM acts as the school's data processor, running the platform on their behalf under a data processing agreement. For a small number of things – the marketing website you're reading now, trial sign-ups, and our own staff accounts – JAM is the controller in its own right.
If you have a question about how your school specifically uses this platform, your school is usually the fastest place to ask. For anything about the platform itself, contact us at support@theschoolgallery.co.uk.
Where a school enables "Sign in with Google" for staff, we use Google Sign-In (OAuth/OpenID Connect) solely to confirm a staff member's identity so they can access their existing staff account. This section sets out exactly how that specific data is handled, over and above the general single sign-on description above.
We do not use Google user data for advertising or targeted/personalised advertising of any kind; we do not sell it, or transfer it, to data brokers or other information resellers; we do not use it to train generalised (non-personalised) AI or machine-learning models; and we do not use it to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes. Google user data obtained via Sign in with Google is used solely to provide and improve the sign-in functionality of the Service itself.
Sharing a photo of your child, and letting you download the full-resolution original, only happens once you grant consent – that consent is the legal basis for that specific processing. Running your account itself (logging in, remembering your preferences) is necessary to perform our contract with the school on your family's behalf. Security logging and fraud prevention rely on our legitimate interest in keeping the platform safe, weighed against your right to privacy. Where the law requires us to keep certain records (e.g. audit trails, billing records), we rely on that legal obligation.
Every photo you can view or download is watermarked in a way unique to your account – this lets a leaked image be traced back to who downloaded it, and is a security measure, not a way of identifying you to third parties. Full-resolution originals are never handed out through a public or guessable link; every download goes through an authenticated, logged request.
We recognise that pupil photos are especially sensitive. Where a photo shows children from more than one family, it is shared only once every tagged pupil's family (or the pupil themselves, once old enough to decide for themselves under our consent rules) has been asked, and a single denial removes that photo for every family, not just the one that denied it.
Where a photo shows only your own children, there is no other family to ask, and it is available to you as soon as it has been uploaded. Approval exists to protect families from a photo of their child reaching someone else, and nothing is being disclosed to anyone else here. This changes nothing about your rights: you can object to any photo at any time, whether or not you were asked about it first, and doing so removes it. If another child is later tagged in that photo, it is withheld again until their family has agreed.
Your school remains responsible for ensuring their use of the platform meets their own safeguarding obligations; we provide the tools that make consent auditable and enforceable.
If you have a safeguarding concern about a specific photo – not a consent decision, a genuine concern about what it shows or how it's being used – every photo in your parent portal has a "Report" option that removes it for every family immediately and alerts both us and your school's own safeguarding contact. You can also email safeguarding@theschoolgallery.co.uk directly.
We share data only with the sub-processors needed to run the service, each under contractual data protection terms. The full list, what each one receives, and where they process it, is kept up to date on our sub-processor register – in summary:
Some of these providers process data outside the UK/EEA. Where that happens, we only use providers who commit contractually to the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum (or the equivalent EU Standard Contractual Clauses) as their transfer safeguard. Full detail on where each sub-processor holds and processes data is kept current on the sub-processor register.
Photos are kept for the retention period your school's plan configures, after which they're permanently deleted – you'll get a reminder email before that happens if you haven't yet downloaded a consented photo. Account and consent-decision records are kept for as long as your account exists.
Audit and security logs – sign-ins, photo views, downloads and account changes – are kept for twelve months, and occasionally up to thirteen, because they are deleted a whole calendar month at a time rather than row by row. Never less than twelve.
One narrow category is kept for longer: the records showing that something was destroyed – a photograph deleted at the end of its retention period, a pupil's record anonymised when they leave, or consent withdrawn. We are required to be able to demonstrate that a deletion was lawful, and a record of it that expires before anyone asks cannot do that. These entries contain no photographs and no contact details beyond the name of the person the deletion concerned.
You have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you or your child, ask us to correct anything inaccurate, and ask us to erase your own account (this can't be requested on your child's behalf – see below). You can log any of these requests from the "Privacy requests" page in your parent portal once signed in, or by emailing dataprotection@theschoolgallery.co.uk. Every request logged in the portal is tracked against a one-month response deadline, as required by UK GDPR Article 12(3). You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office if you believe your data has been mishandled.
A pupil's record belongs to the school relationship rather than any one parent account, so it can't be erased on a single parent's request alone – please contact your school directly for anything concerning your child's own record.
We never show advertising on this website, in the portals or in the app, and we never sell or share your data with anyone who does. What we do is advertise ourselves elsewhere – on search engines, for example – and, on this public marketing website only, measure whether that advertising works.
There is no analytics, advertising or tracking SDK in the mobile app, and none in the parent or staff portals: the places where pupil photographs are shown are never measured, by anything. That is a deliberate boundary, not an oversight, and it is enforced in the platform's own security policy rather than left to good intentions.
On this marketing website, and only if you agree to it on the cookie banner, we use two things. Google Analytics counts page views and shows us where visitors arrive from. Google Ads measurement tells us which of our own adverts led to a sign-up. You can accept either, both or neither, and refusing is one click.
We do not do advertising personalisation or remarketing at all. Ad personalisation is switched off for every visitor regardless of what they choose, we build no audience lists, and nothing we collect follows you around other websites, is shared with data brokers, or is used to build an advertising profile about you. The "Mobile push tokens" and "Activity/audit logs" data described above are used solely to operate the service itself – never for advertising.
The parent and staff portals use strictly necessary cookies only: a session cookie to keep you signed in, a token that protects forms against cross-site request forgery, and – if you tick "remember this device" – one that saves you entering a sign-in code every time. Our public contact and trial-signup forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to filter out automated spam, which may set its own cookie for that purpose. None of these are used to track you, and none of them can be switched off without breaking sign-in.
On this public marketing website we would also like to set two kinds of optional cookie. Google
Analytics cookies (_ga and _ga_<id>, both lasting two years) tell us
which pages are read. A Google Ads measurement cookie (_gcl_au, 90 days) records that you
arrived from one of our own adverts, so a sign-up can be matched back to it – it is never used to
show you an advert here or to target you elsewhere. Neither is set unless you agree, they are asked for
separately so you can allow one and refuse the other, the Google script is not loaded at all until you
do – and
you can change your mind at any time using the
Cookie settings link at the foot of every page, which also
deletes the cookies Google has set. A full list of every cookie, what it does and how long it lasts is
shown in that same panel.
We'll update the date at the top of this page whenever we make a material change, and where a change significantly affects how we use your data we'll aim to let schools know directly.
JAM IT & Design Ltd. General platform questions: support@theschoolgallery.co.uk. Data protection/rights requests: dataprotection@theschoolgallery.co.uk. Safeguarding concerns: safeguarding@theschoolgallery.co.uk.