Terms of use

These terms are between the school that registers for Lekkol and ⁦Gandalfooli⁩, the company that makes the software. Where these pages say “Lekkol” they mean the software; the party bound by this agreement is ⁦Gandalfooli⁩. Whoever registers a school confirms they may act for it.

Staff and families use Lekkol through the school’s account and under the school’s own rules.

A lawyer must settle this: ⁦Gandalfooli⁩ is a working name and nothing more. The country it is registered in, its company number and its registered address are not settled — and an agreement that cannot say who the other party is, or where they can be reached, is worth little in any of the three countries.

Teaching and records are free, and are meant to stay free: pupils, enrolment, attendance, marks, report cards, the timetable, announcements and the family portal are on every plan including the free one, work offline, and are not time-limited.

Paid plans add the modules a school chooses — fees, bookkeeping, canteen, library — and the ability to connect the school to the Lekkol hub. Prices are on the pricing page and are agreed with the school in writing before anything is charged.

A school running offline cannot be switched off for non-payment, because the switch lives on the hub and the hub never reaches it.

• Keep the records accurate. Lekkol prints what it is given, including onto certificates and transcripts.
• Give accounts only to people who need them, and close an account when someone leaves.
• Treat portal codes as keys: one of them identifies a family.
• Use Lekkol lawfully, and hold nothing about a child that the school has no reason to hold.

The records in your Lekkol are yours. We claim no ownership of them, and we do not sell them, share them or mine them for anything.

A full copy can be taken at any time from Settings. It is one file, in a standard database format other software can open. Leaving Lekkol should cost a school nothing beyond the trouble of installing something else.

Lekkol is a record keeper, not an authority. A report card it prints is your school’s statement; no ministry or examination board is obliged to accept a document because Lekkol produced it.

Nothing in Lekkol is legal, medical or financial advice — including the health notes, the arrears figures and the cash book.

On an offline installation the software depends on a computer we cannot see: its disk, its power supply, and the backups the school does or does not take.

An offline installation does not need us in order to keep working, which is the point of it.

Online services, once they exist, are offered without a guaranteed level of availability unless one is agreed in writing with a school.

A lawyer must settle this: How support is reached, in which languages, and within what time. It has not been decided, and it belongs in this clause.

We may suspend a connected school’s account where Lekkol is being used to harm somebody. Non-payment is not misconduct and is never a suspension: a school that stops paying returns to the free offline tier and keeps working. Neither one deletes anything.

A suspension, and a lapse, take the connected side only — syncing, the family portal, messaging, and the school’s own crest in the app. The register, the marks, the timetable, the reports, printing, the fee ledger and every document the school prints keep working in all five states, and every document keeps the school’s own branding whatever the school pays.

A lawyer must settle this: What notice a school is given before suspension, and how it gets its data out while suspended.

A lawyer must settle this: This clause has to be drafted, and it has to be lawful in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia — a limitation copied from an American or European template may be unenforceable in all three. What follows is the intention and not the clause: to answer for our own serious failures, and not for a school’s failed hard disk, forgotten password or missing backup.

A lawyer must settle this: Which country’s law governs these terms, and where a dispute between a school and Lekkol would be heard. Three countries, three possible answers, and it cannot be guessed at.

We will tell schools before changing these terms in a way that matters, and the date at the foot of the page changes with them.