Legal

Privacy policy

Effective 28 September 2026. Applies to the Home Schooling website, the parent dashboard and the child learning app at onlineschoolpractice.com.

Draft for review — not yet in force. Nothing on this page should be relied on until the effective date is confirmed.

The short version

• Home Schooling is a parent-run learning app. Children never create an account, sign in with an email, or enter any personal details. A parent creates each child’s profile and hands the app over with a PIN.
• We collect the minimum we need: a parent’s account details, the first name and year group a parent gives each child, the parent’s settings, and what the child practised so the parent can see progress and the app can choose the next question.
• No advertising, no trackers, no analytics scripts, no selling or sharing of data. The child pages load nothing from third parties.
• The optional AI tutor sends one missed question — never the child’s name, age, profile or history — to Anthropic to explain the mistake. You can see every explanation in the parent dashboard.
• You can see and correct everything from the dashboard, and ask us to delete the family’s data at any time.

1. Who we are

Home Schooling is provided by APPS Design Agency, the company behind Home Schooling (onlineschoolpractice.com) (“we”, “us”), the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: info@appsdesignagency.co.uk.

2. What we collect, and why

From parents (the account holder)

• Email address, used to sign you in with a one-time link (there is no password). If you choose “Continue with Google”, Google tells us your email address and name; we store nothing else from Google.
• Your name and a family name (optional), the curriculum edition you chose (England, Scotland or US) and, from that, your billing currency.
• Billing status for the family plan. Payments are handled by Stripe; we store the subscription status, plan, renewal date and Stripe’s customer and subscription identifiers — never card details.
• Email preferences and a log of what we sent you: the weekly progress digest (on by default, switch it off on your Account page), free-trial reminders, and sign-in links.

About each child, entered by the parent

• A first name or nickname so the child recognises their profile — it need not be their real name — and an avatar they pick.
• A year group, and optionally a birth year and month (never a full date of birth), used only to suggest the year group.
• A 4-digit PIN, stored only as a salted hash, so siblings cannot open each other’s profile.
• Settings you choose: session length, subjects, working levels, daily goals and homework-time windows, rewards, accessibility options (read-aloud, dyslexia font, overlay, large text, reduced motion) and up to three interests (for example “dinosaurs”) used to flavour questions.
• An optional learning-needs profile: tags such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, anxiety or auditory processing, the calm-mode switches they turn on, and up to 500 characters of your own notes. This is information about a child’s health or disability, which the law treats as special category data. We only process it with your explicit consent, which you give by filling in the card and withdraw by clearing it; it is used solely to adapt how the app looks and sounds and to write the learning report you print, and it is never sent to the AI tutor or to anyone else.

Generated while a child uses the app

• Practice history: which question was asked (as a template reference), the answer given, whether it was right, how long it took, hints used, and whether a grown-up helped — so the app can adapt and so you can see progress and trouble spots.
• Learning estimates: for each skill, our estimate of how secure it is (shown to the child only ever as stars that do not go down) and when to review it.
• Sessions and rewards: when sessions started and ended, the coins and stars earned, streaks, the rewards you set up, and the one-tap “how did that feel?” the child can give at the end of a session.
• AI tutor explanations: when the child taps “Explain it to me”, the question, the answer they gave and the explanation we showed are kept so you can read them under Trouble spots. See section 5.

We do not collect location, contacts, photos, microphone or camera data, device or advertising identifiers, or free text typed by the child: the child app has no chat, no search box and no messaging. Read-aloud uses your browser’s own built-in voice; no audio is sent to us.

3. How we use it (and our lawful bases under UK GDPR)

• To provide the service you signed up for — placement, adaptive practice, the parent dashboard, reports and rewards (performance of a contract).
• To keep children safe and the service honest — account-free child profiles, PINs, homework-time rules, row-level security (legitimate interests, with the child’s best interests as the primary consideration under the ICO Children’s Code).
• To bill the family plan and keep the records tax law requires (contract; legal obligation).
• To email you sign-in links and trial reminders (contract), and the weekly digest while it is switched on (legitimate interests; every digest has an off switch and you can turn it off on your Account page).
• To adapt the app to a learning need — only with your explicit consent, as described in section 2.
• To explain a mistake with the AI tutor — part of the service (contract), designed so that no identifying data leaves us (section 5).

We never use personal data for advertising or marketing profiling. The only automated decisions are which question to show next and when to review a skill; they affect nothing outside the app, and a parent can override the working level at any time.

4. Children

The app is made for children aged roughly 4 to 14, always under their parent’s account. A child cannot create an account or be contacted through the app. We have designed the service to the UK Age Appropriate Design Code (Children’s Code): data minimisation, high-privacy defaults, no nudge techniques, no visible score drops or pressure mechanics, no profiling for anything other than choosing the next question, and no third-party code on child pages. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child. If you believe a child has given us information without a parent’s involvement, contact us and we will delete it.

Families in the United States (COPPA): the parent creates every child profile under their own verified email address, which is how we obtain parental consent; the only personal information about a child is the first name or nickname and year group the parent chooses. We do not collect anything from children directly, and we do not sell, share or disclose children’s information except to the processors in section 5 who act on our instructions.

5. Who we share data with

Only the processors we need to run the service, under contracts that limit them to our instructions:

• Supabase — database, sign-in and server functions, hosted in the London (eu-west-2) region. All family data lives here.
• Vercel — hosts the website and app. No analytics or statistics scripts are enabled; Vercel’s servers see ordinary web-server logs (IP address, page requested) for security and reliability, kept briefly.
• Stripe — payments for the family plan. Stripe is an independent controller for the payment itself and sees your email address and payment details; we never do.
• Resend — delivers our emails to parents (sign-in links, the digest and trial reminders).
• Google — only if you sign in with Google; Google’s privacy policy applies to that sign-in.
• Anthropic — the AI tutor. When a child taps “Explain it to me” after a wrong answer, our server sends Anthropic’s Claude model the year-group label (for example “Year 3”), the subject and skill, the question and choices, the answer given, the correct answer, the worked solution, the family’s spelling convention and any interests you chose (for example “space”). It never sends the child’s name, any identifier, the learning-needs profile or any history, so Anthropic cannot tell who the child is. Anthropic does not use this data to train its models. Anthropic may retain the request for up to 30 days for safety monitoring; we have asked for zero-data-retention and will update this page when it is in place. The child cannot type anything to the tutor: it has two fixed buttons, and it is switched off entirely if we ever remove the connection.

Where a processor is outside the UK (Vercel, Stripe, Resend and Anthropic are US companies), transfers rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision. We do not sell personal data, we do not share it for advertising, and — for California residents — we do not “sell” or “share” personal information as those terms are defined in the CCPA/CPRA.

6. Cookies

We use only strictly necessary cookies: the parent’s sign-in session, and a separate sb-child session cookie that keeps a child signed in to their own profile after the PIN. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies, so there is no cookie banner.

7. How long we keep it

• Account, child-profile and practice data: for as long as the family account exists.
• AI tutor explanations: for as long as the family account exists, so parents can always look back at them.
• Email log: for as long as the account exists, so we never send the same digest twice.
• Deleting the family removes every parent, every child profile, all practice history, explanations and rewards, and cancels any subscription. Today you request this by email (section 8) and we complete it within 30 days; a “Delete family” button in the dashboard is planned. Deletion cannot be undone.
• Billing records held by Stripe: as long as tax law requires.

8. Your rights

You can see and correct your family’s data from the dashboard, print a learning report for each child, and switch emails off on your Account page. You also have the right to access a copy of the data, to erase it, to object to or restrict processing, to data portability, to withdraw consent for the learning-needs profile (clear the card) and to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk). Email info@appsdesignagency.co.uk and we will respond within one month. Residents of California and other US states with privacy laws have equivalent rights to know, delete and correct, and to non-discrimination for exercising them; use the same address.

9. Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Every row is protected by database row-level security so a family can only ever reach its own data, and a child’s session can reach only that child’s rows. PINs are stored as salted hashes. The AI tutor runs only on our servers; the child’s browser never talks to Anthropic.

10. Changes

We will post any change here and update the effective date; for material changes we will email account holders first.

Questions? info@appsdesignagency.co.uk · Terms of service · Home