Children do not have accounts

There is no child login in Grained, no password for a child to lose and no way for a child to sign in. A child in Grained is a record that the adults responsible for them keep: teachers and church administrators on one side, parents on the other. Nothing is addressed to a child directly.

We ask for as little as the job needs

A church decides what it enters about the children in its care, and Grained asks for the minimum that makes the product work: a name, a date of birth so a child sits in the right class and gets age-appropriate lessons, and then the things that happen in class — who came, which lesson was taught, which memory verse was learned, which badge was given.

For a family using Grained at home we go further, because there is no church in the chain and a member of the public should not have to hand over more than necessary:

• A name to show. A first name or a nickname is enough — we never ask for a surname.
• A date of birth. Only so the right lessons arrive and move up as the child grows.
• Nothing else. No address, no school, no photograph, no phone number for the child.

Who can see a child’s record

• Their church’s administrators.
• Their teachers — and a teacher is scoped to the classes they are assigned to, in the reports as well as the registers. A teacher cannot browse the whole church.
• Their own parents, through a parent account linked to that child.
• Nobody at another church. Every request is scoped to the church in the signed-in user’s own token, so there is no address a person at one church can visit to reach another’s records.

When someone at Grained needs to look

Sometimes we have to enter a church’s workspace to help — an administrator is locked out, or something needs fixing. We think that is the part most worth being honest about, so it is built to leave a trail:

• Every such access writes an audit record first — who, which church, when, and the reason given — before the access is granted.
• The session is time-limited and expires on its own.
• While inside a church, that access cannot reach platform-wide functions.
• The record cannot be deleted by deleting the thing it refers to. An audit trail that disappears with the evidence is not an audit trail.

“Who at Grained has looked at our records?” is a fair question, and it has an answer.

What we never do

• We do not show advertising to anyone, and there are no advertising trackers in the app.
• We do not sell or share children’s information with anyone. See our privacy page for the technical suppliers it takes to run the service.
• We do not profile children or make automated decisions about them. The growth path is a count of what the adults recorded, nothing more.
• We do not let children message each other. There is no child-to-child contact in Grained of any kind.

Parental control

A parent can ask their church to see, correct or delete their child’s record, and the church can do all three from the screens they use every week. Deleting a child removes their progress, attendance and badges with them. A family using Grained at home can ask us to close the account, and everything in it is deleted rather than hidden.

A note on the older-teen material

Grained’s course for ages 15–18 covers difficult ground — identity, grief, doubt, sexual ethics, abuse. That material deliberately carries safeguarding guidance inside the activities themselves: it directs leaders to use written responses and fictional scenarios rather than inviting a young person to disclose in front of a group, and to route anything that is disclosed to a trusted adult under the church’s own safeguarding policy. Grained does not replace your policy, and nothing in it should be read as doing so.

Last updated 24 September 2026.