FAQ
Halo Education — frequently asked questions
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What is Halo Education?
Halo Education is an AI-native school platform built for K-12. Teachers and school leaders use Halo to build apps over their school data — dashboards, IEP workflows, pastoral check-ins, lesson plans, parent-ready summaries — using multi-step AI agents grounded in their region's curriculum. Halo deploys into the school's own Microsoft tenant; identifiable student records never leave the school's control.
Where is Halo hosted?
Halo is school-hosted. Each school deploys Halo inside its own approved cloud tenant and selects the region for that tenant. For Australian schools, the entire application — including AI agent processing — runs within Australia. Halo does not run a centrally-managed customer SaaS.
Does Halo send student data to AI providers?
No identifiable student record is sent to AI. Names, dates of birth, grades, attendance and pastoral notes stay in the teacher's browser; when AI works with records it sees pseudonymous, aggregate data — shadow IDs, counts, distributions, column names. The one caveat: text a staff member types freely into a chat box is sent as written, never stored server-side, and never used for training. We coach staff to use pseudonyms and are building an on-device de-identification layer that closes even this path.
Which curricula does Halo support?
Halo grounds AI outputs in six curricula: ACARA (Australian Curriculum v9), NCEA Levels 6-8 (New Zealand), KHDA (United Arab Emirates), ICFES (Colombia), England National Curriculum + GCSE (United Kingdom), and CCSS + NGSS (United States). Outputs cite real strand and code identifiers; the AI agents are instructed never to invent curriculum codes.
Which school information systems (SIS) does Halo read?
Halo has live connectors for ten SIS and two LMS platforms: Compass, SEQTA, Sentral, Synergetic, Edumate, TASS, KAMAR, Phoenix, Arbor, Bromcom, plus Canvas and Google Classroom. SIS connectors pull pseudonymised exports into the teacher's browser; identifiable rows are not synced to Halo's servers.
What AI agents are built into Halo?
Halo ships multi-step LangGraph agents for lesson planning, assessment marking, IEP drafting, intervention plans, pastoral check-ins, parent summaries, risk reports, transition plans, retention plans, case review, meeting prep, and referral. Australia-only NAPLAN practice-paper and growth-explainer agents. UAE-only inspection-readiness agent. Halo Studio is an agent that builds whole multi-page apps from a single teacher intent.
How is Halo priced?
Halo is free for individual educators. Schools and enterprises pay for deployment, support, and integrations, priced per school rather than per seat — so cost reflects scope, not student headcount. Because every school's data, curriculum, and procurement constraints differ, school pricing is custom; get in touch and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.
Is Halo free for individual educators?
Yes. Individual teachers can use Halo to build their own private workspaces and apps before any school-level adoption. Free use is intentional — Halo is built around proving value to the teacher first and adopting at the school level second.
How does Halo compare to Toddle?
Toddle is a multi-tenant SaaS AI-LMS built around IB programmes; identifiable student data sits in Toddle's AWS cloud. Halo deploys into the school's own Microsoft tenant and keeps identifiable records in the teacher's browser. Toddle is the more polished LMS today; Halo is the privacy-anchored builder that produces curriculum-grounded apps rather than chat outputs. For non-IB schools, Toddle's strongest moat does not apply.
How does Halo compare to Intellischool?
Intellischool is a governed cloud BI warehouse — your data flows into their warehouse, you ask natural-language questions across it. Halo deploys into your own tenant, runs multi-step agents that build whole apps, and grounds outputs in jurisdiction-specific curriculum. With Intellischool you buy answers; with Halo you buy a capability that compounds — every teacher who asks a question gets a published app the rest of the staff can re-use.
How does Halo compare to MagicSchool, Brisk Teaching, SchoolAI?
MagicSchool, Brisk Teaching, and SchoolAI are US-centric cloud SaaS products where teacher and student data flows to vendor infrastructure. They ship feature-bag generators (single-call LLM wrappers behind a polished UI) rather than agentic builds. Halo deploys in the school's own tenant, runs multi-step agents that produce reusable apps, and grounds outputs in AU / NZ / UAE / Colombia / UK / US curricula.
Can a school audit what AI Halo runs on?
Yes. The internal sub-processor diligence document lists every AI and infrastructure provider with regions, DPA links, and data categories. Enterprise customers receive it as part of onboarding. The customer-facing /subprocessors page covers the categories without naming specific vendors — that detail moves with the contract.
Does Halo train AI models on customer data?
No. Every AI provider Halo uses is contracted with an explicit no-training-on-customer-data clause. Provider-side logging is disabled where the provider supports the toggle. Inference is ephemeral; there is no model-fine-tuning pipeline on customer data.
Does Halo work with Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on?
Yes. School staff sign in with their school's Microsoft Entra account through the standard multi-tenant flow. The school's identity provider gates access; Halo does not store passwords or run a parallel identity system. Workspace access is scoped to the school's email domain.
Is Halo ST4S certified?
Halo is preparing a submission to the Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) assessment and is currently in the readiness phase. ST4S's AI Module is being expanded in version 2026.1; Halo is mapping its architecture to both v2025.1 and the upcoming v2026.1 in parallel. Documentation is available for school IT directors and procurement leads under NDA.
What happens if a teacher uploads a real student CSV?
The CSV is parsed in the browser. Names, dates of birth, and other identifiers are hashed to shadow IDs locally; only the pseudonymised, aggregated form is ever used by AI agents. The teacher can clear the dataset at any time through the Memory tab on the Knowledge page — one click wipes the IndexedDB store.
Can parents see what data Halo holds?
Each teacher's browser holds its own copy. The Memory tab on Halo's Knowledge page surfaces every Dexie table the teacher's device persists, with row counts, last-updated stamps, and a per-table Clear control. Schools that need a formal data-subject-access response retain the full audit chain because Halo never holds the underlying records.
How fast can a school deploy Halo?
A school IT team can spin up a Halo deployment in its own Azure tenant in about 90 minutes — the runbook is published and the GitHub clone process is scripted. Adding SIS connectors is per-connector; most schools complete their first connector inside a week. The license JWT covers usage limits and audit obligations.
Do we need an IT team to run Halo?
No. Schools with an IT team can self-manage from Halo's signed releases. Schools without one choose the operated option: Halo or a certified local partner deploys and runs the same reference architecture inside the school's own environment — every operator action lands in the school's audit log, data never moves, and the school can revoke operator access at any time with one click. School systems and dioceses can run one deployment that serves many schools, each in its own isolated workspace.
What if Halo Education goes out of business?
Because Halo runs inside the school's own cloud tenant from a license-to-host distribution, the school retains the deployed application and its data even if the vendor relationship ends. The kill switch is upstream (license JWT validity, registry access), not backend access — Halo cannot revoke a school's running deployment by flipping a SaaS dashboard.
What happens if our school doesn't renew its Halo license?
The deployment keeps running and your data stays yours. After a 30-day grace period, AI features lock to a read-only core — sign-in, dashboards over existing data, and full data export keep working indefinitely. Security updates continue for 12 months after lapse, so a non-renewal never leaves an unpatched system holding student data. Renewing at any point restores full capability with no reinstall.
How do I get a demo?
Contact contact@haloeducation.app for a tailored demo. Each demo is provisioned against your school's shape — synthetic data matched to your SIS export, your jurisdiction's curriculum, your branding. The demo workspace runs on the school-hosted architecture so you see exactly what the production deployment looks like.