Approved facts only
Your knowledge base holds structured facts and longer answers. Each one is either draft or approved. Only approved content is visible to the assistant — a draft may as well not exist.
Security & privacy
A school assistant handles children's names, parents' contact details and questions people would rather not ask a human. Here is exactly how Gatehouse treats all of it — written for a bursar or a data protection lead, not for a marketing page.
The safety model
The single most important thing to understand: Gatehouse does not browse the internet for answers about your school, and it does not improvise from general knowledge.
Your knowledge base holds structured facts and longer answers. Each one is either draft or approved. Only approved content is visible to the assistant — a draft may as well not exist.
Change a fee or a date and it returns to draft until a member of your staff approves it again. There is no way for unchecked wording to slip into a parent conversation.
Outside its approved facts it declines and offers a human — and records the enquiry so the human actually follows up. It is built to refuse rather than to guess.
Data
Every conversation, lead and booking belongs to one school. A login can only see the school it was invited to. There is no shared pool of families across our customers.
Elm Education staff running the platform see usage numbers — conversations, bookings, cost — not parents' names, messages or contact details. Seeing a school's people requires being given a login by that school.
Your school's data lives in a managed database hosted in Ireland (EU). We will confirm the full hosting arrangement, including our application host, in writing during procurement.
The database refuses access to anything but our own server processes. Public access to school data is switched off at the database itself, not merely in the application.
You set how long conversations are kept. A scheduled clean-up permanently deletes anything past that age — it is a real deletion, not a hidden flag.
If a family asks to be forgotten, your staff can erase that family's conversation and details from the record in one action.
Access
Named accounts, not a shared password taped to the admissions desk.
Two things keep this tidy at your end, and we will say so again at setup:
Compliance
We would rather answer these before you ask than after.
We act as a processor for the family data your school controls, and we will have a data processing agreement in place with you before you go live.
Conversations are processed by a commercial AI provider under a business agreement. We will name the provider and share the relevant terms — including their position on training — as part of procurement.
A short-lived identifier in the visitor's own browser, so a conversation survives moving between pages. No advertising trackers, and we do not sell or share visitor data.
Gatehouse is designed to be used by adults enquiring about a school. It does not discuss an individual child's application, and it will not hold a conversation about a named current pupil.
Your privacy notice governs the family relationship. We will give you the wording you need about the assistant so you can add it to your own notice.
Where we do not yet hold a certification, we say so rather than implying one. Ask us anything on this page and you will get a written answer.
Security questionnaires welcome — we would rather complete yours than send you a brochure.
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