How Bell Path protects school data

Bell Path holds school data: staff names, timetables, cover plans and, where a school chooses, limited verified student support instructions relevant to a CRT assignment. School workspace users sign in, every school sees only its own workspace, roles decide what each person can change, the server checks every request, and access by Bell Path staff is recorded. Account-free CRT and teacher links are limited, expiring and revocable.

This page says what is in place today. Where something is not yet in place, it says that too.

Bell Path is an Australian business run from Victoria, and its servers are in Australia: the website you sign in to, database holding your school information, timetable generator and virus scanning of those files run in Melbourne, and the files staff upload for a CRT and database backups are stored in Sydney.

Bell Path moved its servers to Australia on 22 September 2026. A copy of the database and of files staff uploaded is still held by Railway in Singapore, kept deliberately so the move could be reversed without losing anything a school had entered. It is being deleted once the move has settled, and this page will say so when it is gone. Email, SMS, payments and the optional AI features come from separate companies, so Australian servers on their own do not make every part of the service Australian. The companies Bell Path relies on are named in this pack.

Bell Path's own servers are in Australia, but a copy of school data is still held overseas by the previous provider, and some limited information is processed by the other providers listed below, so a school should still treat Bell Path as involving processing outside Australia.

Schools can read and print the Bell Path risk assessment for the current position on where data is stored and what risk remains.

The School Approval Pack is a fuller printable version for a principal or business manager.

Bell Path has not completed an external certification such as ST4S (Safer Technologies 4 Schools, the security assessment used by Australian education departments), ISO 27001 or SOC 2. If that changes, we will say so in writing.

Many schools must run a security review before using new software, often using the ST4S (Safer Technologies 4 Schools) question set. Bell Path keeps the answers to those questions ready: what data we hold, which providers we use, who can access what, what can be shared publicly, how data is kept and deleted, and how to enter as little personal information as possible.

That material helps a school complete its own review. It is not an ST4S badge, assessment result, Department endorsement or sector approval, and we do not describe it as one.

Schools should complete their own purchasing, privacy, security and sector approval checks before entering live school data. Bell Path will answer reasonable security and data handling questions in writing during that process.

Bell Path is specialist timetabling and planning software that sits beside the systems your Department provides. It does not replace them. It is worth confirming whether your sector already provides something equivalent before you buy.

We take full backups of the production database and practise restoring from them. The practice run includes restoring a single school on its own without touching any other school. The most recent practice restore was completed and checked in July 2026, and an automated check stops us releasing new versions if the newest one is more than a school term old.

Backup settings live in our hosting configuration. We do not promise a fixed backup retention period on this website unless we have verified it in production.

You can check whether the app, database, background jobs and timetable generator are healthy at any time on the System status page.

Schools should keep their own copies of important exports and published timetables, in line with their record-keeping policies. During a busy timetable, staffing or cover period, export the current published timetable and any critical cover sheets so you have them if the service is unavailable.

Bell Path runs from a single production deployment and is provided as available. There is no numeric uptime guarantee today. A binding service level agreement (an uptime percentage, response-time commitments or credits) would need to be a separate written agreement, and we will not imply one through website wording.

What schools can rely on now: a public System status page, an email from hello@bellpath.com.au if Bell Path is degraded on a school day, a practice restore every term enforced by our release checks, and our guidance to keep a printed fallback pack for outage mornings.

If we become aware of a security incident affecting school data, we will investigate, take reasonable steps to contain it, and notify affected schools and regulators where the law or our agreement with the school requires it.

If you suspect a security issue, unauthorised access, an exposed password or a data handling problem, email hello@bellpath.com.au with enough detail for us to investigate.