Safeguards
Qalami safeguards, on one page
For a school's data protection lead: where pupils' work goes, and an answer to each of the six safeguards Abu Dhabi's ADEK asks schools to check for AI tools.
Qalami is a marking tool for teachers, not an AI platform that pupils use. A teacher uploads pupils' finished written work, the AI drafts marks and feedback, and the teacher approves every mark before a pupil or family sees it.
Where the data goes
- What goes in
- Photos or scans of pupils' written work, pupil names (and numbers, if the school adds them), and the rubric. Not collected: parent contacts, addresses, dates of birth, or photographs of faces.
- Who reads the pages
- Anthropic's Claude models, to draft marks and feedback. Anthropic is a US company; pages may be processed in the United States or another country where it runs servers. It does not train on them and deletes them within 30 days.
- Where it is stored
- The database and the scans are in Frankfurt, Germany (Supabase). The app runs in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Railway) and stores no pupil work.
- How long
- Scans: 90 days after the teacher approves the marking. Marks, feedback and reports: 3 years from when the assessment was set, then deleted automatically. If the school leaves: read-only, with a full export for 90 days, then deleted.
- Who can see it
- Only the school's own teachers, each their own classes. The database enforces this row by row, so one school cannot read another's data. A family sees one approved report, through a link that expires after 90 days.
The six safeguards
1. Data protection and student privacy
We process pupils' work only to mark it for the school. It is never sold, used for advertising, or used to train AI models. The school can export everything at any time and ask us to delete it all. A data processing agreement is available on request.
2. Pupils do their own thinking
Pupils write on paper or in their own file, and Qalami reads the finished work afterwards. Pupils never talk to the AI. Feedback quotes the pupil's own words as evidence, and reaches them only through their teacher.
3. Academic integrity
When two papers in the same assignment share much of their wording, both are flagged for the teacher before approval, each with a link to the other. Qalami does not claim to detect writing produced by AI.
4. A teacher approves every mark
Every mark is a draft until a teacher reviews and approves it. The teacher can change any mark, and Qalami records whether each one was accepted or changed. A school can also have its admin check a sample of approved marks, or a colleague second-mark papers without seeing the first marks.
5. Content safety and cultural fit
The AI writes only marks and feedback against the rubric the teacher chooses. It reads Arabic and English handwriting, and the whole interface works in Arabic. A teacher sees every word before a pupil or family does, and Qalami names a spelling or grammar error only when a misreading of the handwriting could not explain it.
6. Fairness
Every paper in an assignment is marked against the same rubric and the same strictness setting. Teachers can hide pupils' names until they approve each paper. Drafts of the same paper can differ slightly between runs, which is one more reason a teacher approves every mark.
This is Qalami's own plain account of what the software does. It is not a certification, or an assessment by ADEK or any other regulator. The full privacy notice is at qalamiapp.com/privacy. Questions: [email protected]. Updated 22 October 2026.