Scottish learning platformPrivacy information
Updated 7 September 2026. Accounts are open and these arrangements are kept under review.
Privacy for young people
Your learning record is yours. Tutor Scotland is run by TUTOR SCOTLAND LTD. You can ask us about privacy at privacy@tutorscotland.co.uk.
You must be at least 13 to use an account. If you are under 16, an adult aged 18 or over must buy access. If you are 16 or 17, you can buy your own £3.99 monthly subscription. If an adult buys for you, they pay the bill, but that does not let them look at your learning record. Buying for yourself does not remove your privacy protections as a young person.
We ask for your email and age group, not your full birthday. We remember your course and small records of activities you complete. This lets you find your progress again and helps us protect your account. We do not use your learning for adverts or predict your exam grade.
What you type can include private information, so do not add names, addresses, health details or other people's private information. Your practice writing is used for that activity. We do not save your everyday answers, essay writing or Folio notes in your progress, and this launch version does not send them to an outside AI service. Our hosting company helps run the website. The full notice explains the other companies that help with login, payment and email.
Optional personalised recommendations are off. You can choose what to practise yourself. Buying access, or having an adult buy it for you, does not mean you have agreed to every possible use of your information. If you buy for yourself, we use a small payment record to manage your subscription; we do not collect subscription debts from 16–17 purchasers. You can ask support about cancelling or challenging a purchase.
When paid access ends, we keep completed progress for up to 30 days so you can recover it or ask for a copy. You can ask us to delete it sooner, even while you have access. A few payment, security or legal records may need to stay longer; we explain why. Backup copies expire separately and are kept out of ordinary use.
You can ask: “What do you know about me?”, “Please correct this”, “Please stop using this” or “Please delete my information”. You can ask an adult you trust to help. Contacting us does not require an active subscription. We normally answer a privacy-rights request within one month. If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the ICO.
Full Privacy Notice
TUTOR SCOTLAND LTD (SC901408, registered in Scotland), 5 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh EH2 4AN, is the controller. Contact privacy@tutorscotland.co.uk or write to that address. Ethan Hendry is responsible for privacy. This notice covers the direct paid-account launch scope; it does not approve a separate school/Classroom service.
Information and sources. We collect your email, broad age group, account identifier and security/notice records; your chosen course, activity identifiers, limited results, completion times and planning milestones; and subscription/entitlement references. The purchaser supplies ordering and billing information; if you buy for yourself, that is you. Billing records remain separate from your learning record. We receive authentication status from Supabase and payment status/references from Stripe. If an adult supplies your learner details, we tell you this when inviting you and provide this notice before you use the account. We do not ask for your school, full birth date, exact location, contact list or identity documents as routine registration data. Network/security systems can process IP addresses and technical request information.
Writing. A practice answer or short planning note may be processed for the activity you choose. Text can identify you or someone else even without a name field. Do not put private or sensitive information in it. We do not keep routine raw writing, essay prose, Folio notes, prompts, generated feedback or conversations in account progress. The launch scope does not send pupil text to an external AI provider. Hosting infrastructure necessarily processes requests; that is different from a separate AI disclosure. Minimal saved records describe the activity/result, not your prose.
Purposes and legal grounds. We use necessary adult purchaser information to arrange and perform the purchase contract. We use legitimate interests to provide every under-18 learner's secure account and minimal progress, and to process bounded practice inputs for the requested activity. For a 16–17 self-purchaser, we also use legitimate interests for the minimum order, payment-status and confirmation information needed to administer the subscription they request, with no debt collection or marketing. An adult learner who is not the purchaser has the same limited learning-service legitimate-interests basis. These interests are delivering the learning service the learner wants, protecting accounts and resolving ordinary help requests. Necessary core processing for an adult who is also the learner can use their contract. We separately use legitimate interests for limited security/abuse prevention and the short post-access recovery/export window. We use legal obligations for applicable tax/accounting records and statutory rights/complaint handling. A longer minimal claims record relies on the legitimate interest in resolving disputes, subject to review. Reading a notice is not consent. The adult's contract is not used as the legal basis for the child's data.
Choices and consequences. Email, age band and minimal security/account records are necessary for an account. Without them we cannot provide authenticated access. Activity text is required only for a task that needs it; you can choose other available learning resources. Optional inferred recommendations and external AI text processing are off for launch. There is no advertising, tracking analytics, sale of personal data, public learner profile or automatic parental/purchaser access. We do not predict examination grades or make legally or similarly significant automated decisions about you. Factual progress and bounded practice feedback are learning aids, not official assessment.
Who helps us
Railway hosts the application, database and worker; Supabase authenticates accounts; Stripe handles payments and subscriptions; Microsoft Azure Communication Services delivers essential mail; Microsoft Azure Blob Storage holds independent backups; Microsoft 365 handles support/privacy correspondence. Payment card details go to Stripe, not through Tutor Scotland. These services receive only information required for their role. Stripe also acts independently for some payment, fraud-prevention and regulatory purposes. We may disclose necessary information to authorities where law requires it and to advisers for a specific legitimate need. Some National 5 practice resources may be generated using OpenAI from fixed teaching instructions. We do not send your answers, writing, identity or learning history to OpenAI. Local checks control the practice and feedback. We do not use AI to write your coursework or give official marks or predicted grades. Where generation is unavailable, we use prepared practice resources.
International processing. Some providers or their support/subprocessors may process information outside the UK. Before any affected processing we require a valid UK adequacy route or appropriate contractual safeguards and any required transfer assessment. You can request details or a copy of applicable safeguards from our privacy contact. The main application and database are hosted in the Netherlands, and account authentication is hosted in London. Our independent database backups are stored in Microsoft’s UK South region. These locations do not mean all support and processing stay in the UK or Europe. We have completed the provider-contract and international-transfer review needed before accounts open, and we keep these arrangements under review.
How long we keep information
Completed progress is kept while access remains available and for up to 30 days afterwards for recovery/export, unless you ask for earlier deletion and no exception applies. Expired unfinished activity is removed promptly rather than held for the whole return period. Registration intents expire after 24 hours. Authentication counters become due for deletion after two days. Published/failed email-outbox metadata is due after 90 days. Payment replay identifiers and limited deletion evidence are due after 400 days. These are purge thresholds; the normal worker runs retention every six hours and failures are investigated. Deletion evidence may still be personal information.
Ordinary support records are kept for up to 24 months after closure, with unnecessary attachments removed sooner. Minimal rights/privacy case evidence is kept for up to three years after closure. Company finance records are normally kept for six years from the financial-year end where required, separately from learning. Security logs are limited by purpose, normally no more than 90 days. Backup copies are restricted to recovery and must not restore erased information to active use. Railway’s scheduled database copies are kept for 6 days (daily), 27 days (weekly) and 89 days (monthly). Its point-in-time recovery keeps the most recent four weekly full backups with the changes needed to recover them. Independent Azure database backups are set to expire after 35 days. Supabase’s daily authentication-database backups are kept for 7 days. Manually created recovery copies do not expire automatically: we keep them restricted, document their purpose and review their removal separately. A deletion from the working service is therefore not an immediate deletion from every backup. Particular legal holds are documented and reviewed, never applied to all learning records by default.
Your rights
You can request access and supplementary information, correction, erasure, restriction, objection and applicable portability. You can object to our legitimate-interests processing. Ask through account tools, email, post or ordinary language; you need not quote a law. We normally respond within one month and explain any lawful extension or exception. You may ask for deletion while a subscription is active. We help resolve billing separately and explain any limited records we must keep. We check identity proportionately. An adult who pays does not automatically have authority over a competent learner's privacy rights.
Complaints. Contact privacy@tutorscotland.co.uk. We acknowledge a data-protection complaint within 30 days, investigate, provide appropriate updates and explain the outcome without unjustifiable delay. A related rights request keeps its own deadline. You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint. We use necessary cookies and similar storage only; see the Cookie Notice. We explain material changes before they affect you and reassess new processing before introducing it.