Privacy Notice

Saving Grace Education Group respects your family’s privacy. This notice explains what personal information we collect through the Saving Grace Education Community, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it and what you can do about it. It is written to meet our obligations under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (“POPIA”).

Last updated: 23 August 2026.

1. Who is responsible for your information

The responsible party is:

Saving Grace Education Group
Table View Time Business Park, 37 Blaauwberg Road, Table View, Cape Town, Western Cape, 7441, South Africa
Telephone: +27 21 300 8859
Email: support@savinggraceeducation.co.za

Our Information Officer, appointed in terms of section 55 of POPIA, is [INFORMATION OFFICER NAME] and may be contacted at [INFORMATION OFFICER EMAIL]. The Information Officer is responsible for our compliance with POPIA and for dealing with any request or complaint you make about your personal information.

2. What this notice covers

This notice covers the Saving Grace Education Community at community.savinggraceeducation.co.za — the forums, the Knowledge Base, member accounts and the feedback form.

It does not cover everything Saving Grace does with your information as a school. Enrolment, fees, assessment, reporting and examination administration through SACAI are separate processing activities. Where those overlap with your community account — for example when we verify that you are a registered Saving Grace parent — we say so below.

3. The information we collect

When you create an account

• Your username, display name and email address
• A password, which is stored in encrypted form and which we cannot read
• Whether your account has been verified as belonging to a registered Saving Grace parent, and the date it was verified

When you post in the community

• The content of your posts, replies and any files you attach
• The date and time of each post
• Your IP address, which the forum software records automatically. Your IP address is never shown publicly. It is visible only to moderators, and only for dealing with abuse.

When you send us feedback

• What you write, the category you select, and your name and email address if you choose to give them
• You may send feedback without signing in and without giving your name

Automatically, when you visit

• Cookies and similar technologies — see our Cookie Policy
• Standard server logs kept by our hosting provider, including IP address, browser type and pages requested

What we do not collect here

We do not ask for identity numbers, financial or banking details, or health information through this community. Please do not post them.

4. Why we process your information, and on what basis

Giving us your information is voluntary. You may read the public parts of the community without an account. If you choose not to give us the information marked as required when registering, we cannot create an account for you and you will not be able to post or reach the private parent areas.

5. Children’s information

This section matters more than any other on this page, and we ask you to read it.

Under section 34 of POPIA, a responsible party may not process the personal information of a child. Section 35 permits it only in defined circumstances — for our purposes, where processing is carried out with the prior consent of a competent person, meaning a parent or guardian who is legally competent to consent on the child’s behalf.

Accordingly:

• Community accounts are for parents and guardians, not for learners. A learner under 18 should not register an account of their own.
• Where a learner does take part with your permission, you as the competent person are consenting to that processing, and you may withdraw that consent at any time.
• Please do not post information that identifies your child — their full name, their photograph, their school marks, an assessment or diagnosis, or the details of a difficulty they are having. The private parent areas are private to a group of Saving Grace families; they are not private to you alone.
• If something concerns only your child and the school, send it through the feedback form or the helpdesk instead of posting it. Those go only to the Saving Grace team.
• Never post information about another family’s child.

If you believe a child’s personal information has been posted in the community, tell us and we will remove it. Every removal is recorded so that we can explain what happened.

6. Special personal information

Section 26 of POPIA prohibits the processing of special personal information — which includes a person’s health, religious or philosophical beliefs, race or ethnic origin, and criminal behaviour — except in the circumstances set out in sections 27 to 33.

We do not ask for special personal information through this community, and we ask you not to volunteer it in a public post. If you send us something of this nature through the feedback form or the helpdesk because it is genuinely relevant to your child’s schooling, we treat it as confidential, restrict it to the staff who need it, and use it only for the purpose you sent it for.

7. Who we share your information with

We do not sell your personal information, and we never will.

What you post in a public area of the community can be read by anyone, including search engines. What you post in a private area can be read by other verified Saving Grace parents and by our staff. What you send through the feedback form is read only by Saving Grace staff who are authorised to handle it.

We share information with the following operators, who process it on our behalf and under our instruction:

• Our hosting provider, which stores the website and its database
• Google (Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager), which measures how the public parts of the site are used. These cookies are set only if you accept them. Google may process this information outside South Africa, including in the United States.
• Our email delivery provider, which sends account and notification emails

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect the safety of a child or another person.

Information sent outside South Africa

Section 72 of POPIA restricts transferring personal information outside the Republic. Some of the services above are provided from outside South Africa. We rely on those providers being subject to binding rules or agreements that give effect to principles for the lawful processing of personal information which are substantially similar to POPIA’s conditions.

8. How long we keep it

Section 14 of POPIA requires that we do not keep records longer than is necessary for the purpose we collected them for, unless a law requires otherwise.

9. How we protect your information

Section 19 of POPIA requires us to secure the integrity and confidentiality of your personal information by taking appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures. Ours include:

• The whole site is served over an encrypted connection (HTTPS)
• Passwords are stored hashed, never in a form we can read
• Private areas are restricted to signed-in, verified members, and are blocked from search engines
• Feedback submissions have no public web address of any kind — there is no page that displays them, not even a hidden one
• Access to member information is limited to staff whose work requires it
• Every moderation action is logged with who took it and when

If a security compromise occurs where there are reasonable grounds to believe your personal information has been accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, section 22 of POPIA requires us to notify the Information Regulator and to notify you, as soon as reasonably possible after discovering it.

10. Your rights

Under POPIA you have the right to:

• Be told that we hold information about you, and to ask for a copy of it (section 23). We may charge the prescribed fee for a copy.
• Ask us to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or obtained unlawfully (section 24).
• Object to our processing of your information on reasonable grounds (section 11(3)).
• Withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already happened lawfully.
• Not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that has legal consequences for you (section 71). We do not make such decisions.
• Complain to us, and to the Information Regulator (section 74).

To exercise any of these rights, contact our Information Officer using the details in section 1. We will respond as soon as reasonably possible. Requests for access are dealt with under the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000, and you may be asked to complete the prescribed form.

11. Marketing

Section 69 of POPIA restricts direct marketing by electronic communication. We do not use your community account to send marketing. Notification emails — telling you that someone has replied to your question, for example — are part of the service, not marketing, and you can unsubscribe from any discussion at any time.

12. Cookies

We use a small number of cookies. Which ones are set depends on the choice you make on the banner when you first visit. Our Cookie Policy lists every cookie by name and explains how to change your mind.

13. Complaints

Please come to us first. Contact our Information Officer using the details in section 1, or use the feedback form. We would far rather hear about a problem and fix it.

You also have the right to complain directly to the regulator at any time:

The Information Regulator (South Africa)
Woodmead North Office Park, 54 Maxwell Drive, Woodmead, Johannesburg, 2191
Telephone: 010 023 5200
Toll free: 0800 017 160
General enquiries: enquiries@inforegulator.org.za
POPIA complaints are lodged through the Regulator’s eServices portal at eservices.inforegulator.org.za

14. Changes to this notice

We will update this notice when what we do changes. The date at the top tells you when it last changed. Where a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell members directly rather than relying on you to notice.