Information families give us
When you enquire about a school, book a visit, save a shortlist, request a call, register for an open day, or create an account, we collect what you enter: your name, email address, and — where you provide them — your telephone number, country, preferred language, the schools and programmes you are interested in, your intended start date, an indicative budget range, and any message you write. Some of these fields are optional; the form tells you which are not. None of it is a legal requirement — you give it because you are asking us to do something — but without the required fields we cannot send your enquiry, hold your booking, or carry an application to the school, because the school needs them to reply to you.
Information about a child
If you are enquiring or applying on behalf of a child, we collect the information you choose to give about them: their name or first name, year of birth, current school year, languages spoken and desired, boarding preference, and any interests or notes you add. In an admission application, the questions themselves are set by the school you are applying to, so the exact fields vary. We do not knowingly collect information directly from a child; these forms are intended to be completed by a parent, guardian, or an adult applicant.
Sensitive information
Some fields can attract information about health — a free-text “special educational needs” field on a student profile, and any medical, dietary or support questions a school adds to its own application form, together with documents you upload. Under the GDPR this is special-category data, and under the Swiss FADP it is particularly sensitive personal data. We do not require it: provide it only if you want the school to have it. Where you do, we rely on your explicit consent, recorded at the point of submission.
Information school staff give us
For school users we collect account details (name, work email address, role, telephone number where given), the content you publish about your school, your team and invitation records, your booking and admissions configuration, your billing and VAT details, and — for schools that take application fees through the platform — the identifiers your payment provider needs. Passwords are never visible to us; they are stored as salted hashes by our authentication provider.
Information collected automatically
When you visit a school profile we record the page viewed, the referring page, the date and time, an approximate country, region and city derived from your connection, your browser's user-agent string, and a device category. Your IP address is used in the moment — to derive that approximate location, to apply rate limits, and as an input to a daily-rotating one-way hash — and is not stored. See “Measurement and cookies” below for the identifiers involved and how to switch them off.
Information from public sources
Our directory includes schools that have never registered with us. Their profiles are compiled from publicly available sources — principally the school's own website and public registers — and may include the name and job title of a head of school or other senior staff member. If you are named on a profile and want that changed or removed, write to privacy@swissprivate-schools.ch; we will act on it, and you do not need to give a reason.
