Safer Technologies 4 Schools
ST4S is an assessment programme for Australian and New Zealand school authorities. PezNet has not been assessed under it and holds no ST4S outcome.
This page exists because schools ask, and because the honest answer is short. It is also the one page in this set with no scorecard on it. That is deliberate, and the reason is set out below rather than left as an absence you have to interpret.
This expands one row of the standards table in the main privacy policy. The standard itself is published by its own authority: Education Services Australia.
Not assessed, and not implying otherwise
PezNet holds no ST4S outcome. Not a low one, not a provisional one, and not one that has lapsed: there has never been an assessment. The programme's rules forbid a supplier suggesting otherwise, and we would take the same view without being told to.
What ST4S actually is
Safer Technologies 4 Schools is run by Education Services Australia, a ministerial not-for-profit company, through its National Schools Interoperability Program. It was built with the Australian state, territory, Catholic and independent school sectors and New Zealand's Ministry of Education, so that a supplier answers one security, privacy, safety and interoperability assessment rather than a different questionnaire for every jurisdiction.
The important part, and the part most often got wrong: an ST4S assessment is not a certificate awarded to a supplier. It produces an outcome that goes to education authorities, who decide what to tell their own schools. Suppliers do not hold the findings and are not permitted to hand them out.
Participation is voluntary, and a supplier cannot simply buy an assessment either. Services are nominated and prioritised by an education working group according to what schools are actually asking for, with a limited number assessed in each round.
Where PezNet stands
PezNet has not been assessed. There is no ST4S outcome for it, no report, no product badge, no licence agreement with the programme, and no entry in the ST4S catalogue.
That is the whole of it, stated plainly because the alternative is a sentence carefully built to leave you with a better impression than the facts support. If you have seen ST4S status claimed for PezNet anywhere, by us or by anyone reselling it, that claim is wrong and we would like to hear about it.
Why this page has no scorecard
Every other standard in our register gets graded line by line on a page like this one. This is the exception, for two reasons, and both are worth knowing because they are also the reasons to be sceptical of any supplier who does publish an ST4S self-grade.
The first is that the programme's supplier rules are explicit: you must not suggest or imply that you conform to the ST4S criteria unless you have completed a full assessment that is still current. A scorecard we marked ourselves is exactly that implication, however many caveats sit above it.
The second is copyright. The criteria live in a guide published by Education Services Australia which may not be reproduced in whole or in part. We are not going to republish somebody else's assessment framework in order to mark our own homework against it.
So this page tells you what we hold, which is nothing, and points you at the people who would actually know.
If you are a school or an education authority
ST4S findings are distributed by education authorities, not by suppliers, and suppliers are directed to send these enquiries on rather than answer them themselves. For a government school that means your State or Territory department of education; for a Catholic school, your diocese, commission or state office; for an independent school, the association of independent schools in your State or Territory; and in New Zealand, the Ministry of Education. The programme's own site lists the current contacts.
If you would like PezNet assessed, saying so to your authority carries weight in a way a supplier asking on its own behalf does not, because assessments are prioritised on school demand. Tell us as well, so we know it is being asked for.
What is already published, and what is yours
Two things are worth knowing while you wait on an answer we cannot give you.
PezNet is self-hosted. The records your school keeps in it live on your own server, under your control, and never reach us. That puts most of what an assessment of a hosted service would examine, namely the security and operation of the system actually holding your data, in your hands rather than ours.
What is ours is the software itself, and the small set of services an install talks to for licensing, updates and feedback. We publish where we stand on those in detail, gaps named rather than smoothed over, against ISO 27001, the Essential Eight, SOC 2 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Those assessments are our own and say so, and between them they cover most of the ground any school security and privacy questionnaire asks about. Read them and judge the substance for yourself.
ISO/IEC 27001, control by control · Essential Eight, strategy by strategy · What we hold and why