Cookie policy

A cookie is a small piece of text a website asks your browser to keep and send back on your next request. We use them for one thing: so that the server knows the page you just asked for belongs to the person who signed in a moment ago. Without that, you would have to sign in again on every screen.

bhb_demo_session

Keeps you signed in to the parent and staff portal, and records which academic year you are working in. It is signed by the server, holds no password, and is not readable by scripts in your browser.

How long: Until you sign out or close the browser, and in any case ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

bhb_google_oauth_state

Set for a few seconds while a school administrator connects the school's Google Workspace account, to prove the reply came back from Google and not from somewhere else. Never set for a parent.

How long: Ten minutes, or until the connection completes.

bhb_meta_oauth_state

The same one-time check when an administrator connects the school's Meta account for WhatsApp messaging. Never set for a parent.

How long: Ten minutes, or until the connection completes.

All three are set by this site itself. None is set by an advertiser, an analytics company or a social network, and none is readable by another website.

• No advertising or retargeting cookies, and no advertising identifiers. The school sells no advertising space and buys no ads that track you here.
• No third-party analytics — no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no heatmap or session-recording tool. We do not measure your visit.
• No cross-site tracking, and nothing that follows you after you leave this site.

When you pay fees, the payment itself happens on the payment gateway’s own pages. Anything that gateway sets there is theirs, governed by its own policy, and is used to complete and secure your transaction.

A consent banner exists to ask permission for cookies that are not needed to provide the service you asked for — chiefly advertising and analytics. We set none of those. A cookie that only keeps you signed in is necessary for the very thing you came to do, and asking you to consent to it would be a formality with no choice behind it.

If the school ever adds analytics or any third-party tag, this page will list it and you will be asked before it is set. That is a commitment, not an intention.

Two more kinds of storage are worth naming, because a browser’s privacy settings treat them alongside cookies:

• Local storage in the portal. Once you are signed in, the portal keeps a working copy of the screens you use on your own device so they open without waiting for the network. It is a cache of data you are already entitled to see, it never leaves your browser, and clearing your site data removes it.
• The mobile app. The app keeps a signed sign-in token and the same kind of cached copy. Uninstalling the app removes both. What the app asks your phone for is set out in the privacy policy.

Every browser lets you block or delete cookies for a site, under Settings → Privacy. Blocking ours is allowed and breaks nothing you can read without signing in — the public pages, the fee structure and these policies all work. You will not be able to sign in to the portal, because staying signed in is what the cookie is for.

Questions about anything on this page can go to director@bhbinternational.school.