Terms of use and rules for publishing reviews

1. What this site is

Skolbera is an information project: a ranking of internationally accredited schools, editorial material and reviews written by users. The site is free to use.

We are not an educational institution, not a school placement agency and not an intermediary in admissions. We give no individual recommendations, and we take no payment from schools in any form. More about the project.

The ranking is a score from an open formula, not the truth. The decision about a school is yours, and we advise you to visit the school in person and to talk to its administration and to the parents of its students.

2. Registration

• Registration is open to people aged 16 and over.
• One person, one account. Accounts opened to inflate ratings are deleted together with their reviews.
• Give a working email address: a review cannot be published until the address is confirmed.
• Keeping your password safe is your responsibility. If you suspect that someone else is using it, change it and write to us.

How we handle your data is set out in our personal data policy.

3. Rules for publishing reviews

You may, and please do:

• write about your own experience: you studied here, you study here now, you worked here, or you take your child to this school;
• say what was bad, if it is true and you are ready to describe it;
• tell people about the details that are not on the school's own site: the timetable, the workload, the food, the transport, the way children are treated.

What you may not do:

• name members of staff, students or other parents, or give any of their personal data;
• insult, humiliate or threaten;
• publish statements you know to be false, or rumours you have not checked;
• stir up hatred on national, racial, religious or any other grounds;
• post advertising, links to commercial services, or invitations to chats and channels;
• review a school you are tied to commercially or as a competitor;
• publish text or images belonging to other people without the right to do so.

A review has to be longer than 120 characters: a single line can neither be checked nor judged.

4. Moderation

Every review goes through moderation before publication: it does not appear on the site until a person has read it. This usually takes up to two working days.

A moderator can publish a review, reject it, or take names and the personal data of third parties out of the text while keeping its meaning. We make no substantial edits to the content: if a review does not belong here, we reject it rather than rewrite it.

The rating from a review counts towards the school's overall score only once the review is published. The community rating enters the index when a school has at least five verified reviews: one or two are not enough to draw a conclusion from.

You can see your own reviews and their status in your account. While a review is in moderation, you can change it or delete it.

5. Complaints and a school's right of reply

If you believe that published material or a review breaks the law or states something untrue, write to hello@skolbera.com. Give the link to the page, the exact sentence, and what precisely is wrong with it.

• We look into the request and reply within 24 hours.
• Material that plainly breaks the law is taken down at once, before any inquiry.
• A disputed review may be hidden for as long as we are checking it.
• We give the decision, with our reasons, both to the person who complained and to the author of the review.

Right of reply. The school a review speaks about may send an official response. We publish it next to the review or the material, in full, provided it does not break these same rules. This right does not depend on whether we agree with the school.

Errors in the data (an out-of-date fee, a wrong accreditation, a missing school) we correct as a matter of routine and without argument: send us the link to the source.

6. Rights to the content

By publishing a review you confirm that you wrote it yourself, and you allow us to show it on the site and to quote it in the digest, marked as a review written by a user. The copyright in the text stays yours.

The ranking, the method behind it, the editorial material and the design of the site belong to the project. Quoting us is welcome, with a link to the page you took it from. Copying the database or the material in full is not allowed.

7. Liability

Data about schools is taken from official registers and from the schools' own sites, and it can go out of date. We show the date of the last check beside every block of data, but we do not guarantee that the information is correct at the moment you read it. Before you decide, check the key facts with the school itself.

Reviews carry the personal opinion of their authors, not the position of the project. We check reviews against these rules, but we cannot confirm every statement an author makes.

We are not liable for decisions taken on the strength of the ranking, or for what comes of studying at any particular school.

8. Blocking an account

We may delete a review and block an account without warning if a user breaks these rules systematically, inflates ratings, passes themselves off as someone else, or uses the site for advertising. When we block an account, we give the reason to the email address it is registered to.

9. Changes to these terms, and the applicable law

These terms may change. The date of the version is at the top of the page, and we tell registered users about substantial changes by email.

The processing of personal data is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union (GDPR): the database sits in Frankfurt, and we hold to that standard for every user, whatever country they are in. If the law of your country gives you more rights, those rights apply - we do not try to limit them with this document.

A dispute that correspondence has not settled is resolved at the place where the project is based. But write to us first: in all this time there has not been a case that could not be sorted out by email.

Contact us: hello@skolbera.com