The Lekkol Charter

This charter binds the school as an institution, through the people who accept it on the school’s behalf. Acceptance happens in two stages, because the obligations do.

• At setup, one person accepts, records their name and role, and asserts that they are authorised to accept for the school. That is enough for a free offline installation, where almost nothing in this charter can bite.
• Before the school connects — sync, seats, the portal or any paid tier — a second person accepts: the proprietor, director, or whoever holds authority over the institution rather than over the office. A head teacher who leaves in a year cannot bind a school for five.

Each acceptance is recorded permanently: name, role, date, and which version of this charter was accepted. A charter nobody can prove was shown is a charter that does not exist. Material changes require fresh acceptance.

A lawyer must settle this: Whether an authorised-signatory assertion actually binds a school under Sierra Leonean contract law, and whether school proprietorship is registered in a way Lekkol can check, both need answering.

The school will not knowingly enter false marks, false attendance or false enrolment records, and will not issue a certificate, transcript or testimonial through Lekkol for a pupil who did not earn it.

This clause is first because Lekkol issues verifiable documents: a certificate carries a code anyone can check against the record behind it. If the record itself is invented, the verification is worse than useless — it lends Lekkol’s credibility to a forgery. This is the clause where Lekkol’s interest and a pupil’s interest are the same interest.

Consequence: suspension. Repeated or systematic falsification: final suspension.

The school will not refuse admission to, exclude, expel, or withhold records from a pupil on grounds of ethnicity, religion, nationality, disability, gender, pregnancy or motherhood, or the family’s circumstances.

A lawyer must settle this: Pregnancy needs local grounding rather than a borrowed clause. Sierra Leone’s ban on pregnant girls sitting in school was struck down by the ECOWAS Court of Justice in 2019 and lifted domestically in 2020 — the current position in all three countries, and the standing of Sierra Leone’s “radical inclusion” policy, must be verified before this wording is fixed.

The faith exception: a school of declared religious character may admit by religious affiliation. A daara teaching the Qurʼān to Muslim children, or a mission school its own congregation, is doing the thing it exists to do. The exception is bounded, and the bounds are the whole point:

• It covers admission only. Once a child is enrolled, they cannot be treated worse, excluded, or refused their records on religious grounds.
• It licenses nothing else. A faith school may not exclude for ethnicity, disability, pregnancy or motherhood — religion is the exception, not a door to the others.
• It must be declared, not silent. The school states its religious character in Lekkol. A school that says what it is and admits accordingly is doing something different from one that presents as open and quietly turns families away.

Single-sex schools are a separate matter and not discrimination in this sense.

A lawyer must settle this: Whether the declared-character carve-out matches how faith schools are actually regulated in each country, and whether a lawful-but-discriminatory practice can be treated as a breach of contract at all, are lawyer’s questions.

Consequence: suspension pending appeal.

The school will not use Lekkol to conceal, alter or destroy a record relating to a child’s safety, and will not obstruct a lawful request from an authority entitled to see one.

Lekkol acts on tampering it can see in its own system — a safeguarding record altered or deleted, an audit trail that does not match. Lekkol does not act on allegations of abuse, because it cannot investigate them: a software vendor that pretends to adjudicate a child-protection case does harm in both directions — it lends false authority to a finding it cannot support, and it becomes a venue where a complaint can be buried instead of reported. An allegation of abuse goes to the authority, not to an appeal panel.

A lawyer must settle this: Whether Lekkol may, or must, notify an authority itself is a lawyer’s question with a serious wrong answer in both directions, and it differs across the three countries.

The preservation hold. The fear in a safeguarding case is destroyed evidence, not continued access — and destruction is the one thing Lekkol can actually prevent. So alongside an ordinary suspension, a hold blocks erasure of Lekkol’s copy and nothing else: the school keeps its local installation, keeps working, keeps exporting, and families keep the portal. A hold is imposed by a named person with written reasons, reviewed every 90 days by that same standard, and its existence is disclosed to the school. Because a hold takes nothing away, it can outlive an appeal without becoming a punishment by another name — which is why child protection needs no exemption from the appeal deadlines below.

Consequence: suspension, plus a preservation hold. Systematic or repeated tampering: final.

Pupil and family data entered into Lekkol will be used to run the school. It will not be sold, rented, or passed to a third party for marketing, political canvassing, or recruitment.

Consequence: suspension pending appeal.

Staff accounts are individual. The school will not share one login between several people, and will deactivate an account when its holder leaves.

The audit log is only worth keeping if a name in it means a person: a shared login turns every record of who changed a mark into a shrug.

Consequence: warning, then suspension if unremedied. This is a housekeeping failure far more often than misconduct, and is treated that way.

A school behind on payment is not in breach of this charter. It returns to the free offline tier and keeps working: sync, the family portal and messaging stop; the school’s own records do not.

This distinction is the whole reason the charter exists. One switch that both collects debts and punishes discrimination is a switch that will eventually be used for the wrong one.

• The free tier stays free. A school that never pays, stops paying, or is suspended keeps a working local installation: register, marks, timetable, reports, printing. What is lost is the connected side.
• Records are never deleted as a penalty. Not on suspension, not on final suspension, not on non-payment. A school’s copy is the school’s; where Lekkol holds a cloud copy, it is deleted only when the school asks.
• Export is always available. In every state, including final suspension, the school can export everything it has put in, in a format that opens without Lekkol. These are children’s academic records, and whether the school behaved is not a transferring pupil’s fault.
• A human decides. No school is ever suspended by an automated signal. A person decides, and puts the reason in writing.
• Notice, reasons, and an appeal. A suspended school is told which clause, what the evidence is, and how to appeal — in writing, before the suspension takes effect where that is possible.
• Families are not punished for the school’s conduct. During an open appeal, parents and pupils keep read access to their own records through the portal, and can download them.
• Transparency without naming. Lekkol publishes this charter, the appeals process, and aggregate figures — how many schools were suspended, under which clause, how many appeals succeeded. It does not publish the names of suspended schools: naming punishes pupils and parents for something they did not do.
• Family data is never sold. Ever, to anyone, in any state of the relationship.

A lawyer must settle this: Whether publishing the names of suspended schools would expose Lekkol to defamation claims in any of the three countries deserves a lawyer’s view, though the restraint above stands on its own reasons.

Lekkol can only act on what it can see or what it is told. A school running fully offline is beyond its reach, and this charter does not pretend otherwise: there is no remote kill switch over a school’s records, and Lekkol does not want one.

• Active: everything works.
• Unpaid: the local app keeps working; sync and the portal stop; export stays open.
• Suspended, appeal open: the local app keeps working; records still reach the hub; the portal is read-only for families; export, transfer and erasure stay available.
• Suspended, final: the local app keeps working; sync and the portal stop; export stays open for 90 days from the notice, and the data survives beyond that as described below.
• Closed, because the school leaves: the local app keeps working; export stays open, and the cloud copy is erased on request.

In every state on that list, the local application keeps working. Nothing Lekkol can impose takes a school’s own records away from it.

• The school has 60 days from the written notice to appeal. Generous on purpose: a notice can sit unread through a fortnight of outages, a rainy season, or a proprietor travelling, and a window that expires before anyone opened the letter is not a window.
• An appeal is a letter, an email, or a phone call to a named person at Lekkol. Not a form, not a tribunal — a school with one office and a bad connection must be able to appeal with the phone in its hand.
• Lekkol acknowledges within 5 working days of receipt, and decides within 30 calendar days, in writing, with reasons.
• During an open appeal the school stays in “appeal open”, never “final”.
• If Lekkol misses its own deadline, the suspension lifts, and the school returns to active until the panel decides. This clause is what makes the rest of the section credible rather than decorative: Lekkol is the party with the power here, and a deadline that costs it nothing to miss is not a deadline.

Who decides: a panel of three, convened per appeal, drawn from a standing pool. Three, not two, because two deadlock and a deadlock favours whoever already holds the power. The person who imposed the suspension is never on the panel. At least one member comes from outside Lekkol — an educator from the region, paid a small honorarium per appeal — and nobody with a relationship to the school, in either direction. Majority decides, reasons in writing; the decision is final inside Lekkol and waives none of the school’s legal rights.

The pool is built over time, and a name must have been in it before the appeal was logged: membership is timestamped, and the draw considers only earlier members. Picking judges after reading the case is how a panel loses its legitimacy — and the damage is not that Lekkol would stack it, it is that Lekkol could never prove it had not. The draw is mechanical: the three eligible members who have served least recently. The school may object once to a named member for conflict of interest. If the pool holds fewer than three eligible names, the suspension cannot harden — the school stays in “appeal open” until a panel can be convened, which points the pressure to build the pool at the party who can.

A lawyer must settle this: One exception to consider: whether a child-protection suspension should lift on a missed deadline needs a lawyer, and must not become a loophole that swallows the rule.

• Export: everything, always, in an open format.
• Transfer: hand the export to another system or another operator.
• Erase: deletes the copy on Lekkol’s servers. The school’s local copy is unaffected, because it was never Lekkol’s.
• Export before erase: erasure requires an export to have been taken first. This stops a school under investigation from destroying the evidence — and, the reason that actually matters, it stops a school from answering a discrimination finding by wiping the academic history of the children it discriminated against.

A lawyer must settle this: This must be checked against any local data-protection right to erasure. A statutory right to be forgotten may not tolerate an export precondition; if so, the right wins and this clause changes.

After a final suspension: 90 days of open export access from the notice. Then access closes, but the data is not deleted — it is held for a further nine months, and a written request restores access within them. Deleted at twelve months, after a warning, or earlier if the school asks. Deletion is a deliberate act with a warning attached, never a timer that runs out while nobody is watching: holding a small school’s records costs close to nothing, and a destroyed transcript cannot be reconstructed at any price.

During an open appeal, parents and pupils keep read access through the portal — marks, attendance, report cards, receipts, all viewable and downloadable. Messaging is closed, and the portal says why. The penalty takes away the collaborative side, not the parents’ sight of their own children’s schooling.

Lekkol gives notice before a change takes effect, and a school that does not accept the change may leave and take its data. Every acceptance records the version accepted, and a materially changed charter is presented for acceptance again — in the app, and to anyone downloading the application.

A lawyer must settle this: The notice period is not yet set, and unilateral amendment clauses are often where agreements of this kind fail. A lawyer must settle both.