Privacy policy

AltEd (alted.ac) is a portal for alternative education in the UK, connecting home-educating families with tutors and education providers. In this policy "we" means AltEd, and "you" means the account holder using the service. For the personal data described below, AltEd is the data controller unless stated otherwise, and we operate under UK data-protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018).

• Account details — your name and email address, used to sign you in (by magic link, password, passkey or a linked Google, Microsoft or Apple account) and to send you service emails.
• Student information entered by guardians — a student's first and last name, date of birth, and any notes a guardian chooses to record. Students do not create accounts; their profiles are created and managed entirely by their guardian.
• Education records you create — curricula, lessons, assignments, resources, calendar events, session records, and the notes attached to them.
• Billing records — lesson prices, session charges, credits and the resulting transaction history between a provider and a family. Card details themselves never touch AltEd (see Payments below).
• Technical data — your browser type, device and IP address, collected automatically to keep the service secure and working.

AltEd is used by adults. Information about children (a student's name, date of birth and guardian-written notes) is entered and controlled by their guardian, who decides what to record and which providers may see it. We use that information solely to provide the service to the guardian and their chosen providers — never for advertising, profiling or any other purpose. Guardians can edit or delete a student profile at any time.

• To provide the service — store and display your records, run the shared calendar, keep the provider↔family ledger accurate, and deliver sign-in links.
• To send service emails — magic links, verification emails and important account messages are delivered through our email provider, Brevo.
• To take payments — card payments are processed by Stripe; we receive confirmation of payment but never see or store full card numbers.
• To keep the service secure — diagnose problems, prevent abuse and protect accounts.

We do not run advertising, we do not sell personal data, and we do not use your records (or your children's) to train advertising or profiling systems.

AltEd can draft a written summary of a learner's records — the sort of thing a local authority might ask a family to provide. This feature is off by default and does nothing unless you switch it on for your own account in Settings.

When you switch it on and then press the button to draft a summary, we send a condensed description of what you have recorded for that learner and period to Anthropic, which operates the language model that writes the draft. That description contains: the learner's first name and date of birth, the period covered, the number of days and hours logged and how they were categorised, the subjects studied with counts of work set, completed and marked and any averages, the titles, dates, kinds and descriptions of portfolio evidence, and the names of providers with how many sessions they delivered.

Nothing is sent in the background, on a schedule, or without you asking. Nothing is sent for learners you have not drafted a summary for. We do not use your records to train any model, and you can see the exact list of facts a draft was written from underneath the draft itself.

The result is a draft belonging to you. AltEd does not store it, file it, or send it to anybody — including your local authority. Switching the feature off in Settings stops this immediately, and nothing else in AltEd depends on it.

We share data only with the processors needed to run the service:

• Stripe — to process card payments between families and providers.
• Brevo — to deliver sign-in links and the emails the service sends.
• Anthropic — only if you switch on AI-drafted summaries, and only at the moment you press the button. See the section below.
• Our hosting provider — to run the application and store its database securely.

Within the product itself, information is shared only as the service is designed to share it: a provider you work with sees the students, sessions and ledger entries that involve them, and nothing else.

Access to your data is scoped to your account and role, transmitted over encrypted connections, and protected by industry-standard safeguards. No system is perfectly secure, but we treat the fact that this service holds information about children as a reason to hold ourselves to a higher bar, not a footnote.

Under UK data-protection law you can request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal data, object to certain processing, and complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). Guardians exercise these rights on behalf of the children whose profiles they manage. To make a request, contact us using the details below.

We keep your data for as long as your account is active. When you close your account we delete or anonymise your personal data — including student profiles — except where we must keep records (for example, payment records) to meet legal obligations.

Questions about this policy or your data? Email us at hello@alted.ac.