Privacy policy

1. A summary for young people

We keep your first name, your username, your school year and how you do in practice and mock papers, so you can see your progress and your parent can help you. We keep your PIN locked up so that nobody, not even us, can read it. We do not show you adverts, and we do not share your answers with anyone except the parent or guardian who looks after your account.

2. Information we collect

We do not ask for teenagers’ surnames, email addresses, photos, dates of birth or schools. Please do not enter them anywhere in the service.

3. How we use it, and our lawful basis

We do not send marketing emails, and we never use young people’s data for marketing or advertising. The only automated decision we make is adjusting the difficulty of practice questions to how someone is doing; it has no legal or similar effect.

4. Who we share it with

We never sell personal data. Inside the service, a teenager’s information is seen only by the parent who created the account and by the teenager when signed in. We use these providers, each under a contract that only lets them use the data to provide their service to us:

We may also share information if the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or with a new owner if Oakling Academics is ever sold or merged, in which case this policy would continue to apply and we would tell you first.

5. International transfers

Our app runs in London. Some of our providers are based in the United States, so some data may be processed there. Where that happens, the transfer is protected by the UK’s approved safeguards, such as the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

6. Cookies

We use only cookies that are strictly needed for the service to work, so we do not ask for cookie consent:

• A sign-in cookie that keeps you signed in. It lasts up to 30 days and is removed when you sign out.
• A temporary cookie that protects “Continue with Google”, for parents who use it. It lasts ten minutes.

We use no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies.

Reading preferences

If you change the text size, spacing, font, colours or movement under Reading preferences, your choices are saved in your browser’s local storage on that device so they are still there next time. If you are not signed in as a student, they are never sent to us, and clearing your browser data or choosing “Back to the standard look” removes them.

A student’s avatar and reading preferences

A signed-in student can choose an avatar (a drawn animal or bird, or a drawn girl or boy with the skin tone, hair and extras they pick) and set their reading preferences on their profile page. We save these choices with the student’s account so they look the same on any device the student signs in on. They are only those choices from fixed lists, never a photo, and nobody else on the site can see them except the student’s parent. They are deleted with the account, and they are included when a parent downloads the account’s data.

Counting visits

To see how many people visit our pages and which ones they find useful, we use Vercel Web Analytics. It sets no cookies and builds no profile of anyone: each visit is counted using a code that changes every day and cannot identify you, and we only see totals, such as page views, the website you came from, and your country and type of device. Practice, mock paper, student and parent dashboard pages are never counted, and nothing typed into the site is sent.

7. How long we keep it

• Account and progress information is kept while the account is open.
• When a parent removes a teenager from their dashboard, that teenager’s account and all their records are deleted straight away.
• When a parent deletes their account from the Your data section of their dashboard, the account and every teenager account it owns are deleted straight away. If you email us instead, we will do it within 30 days. Backups held by our database provider are overwritten within a further 30 days.
• Records of failed sign-ins and email counts are cleared after about a day.

8. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• get a copy of your data;
• have it corrected if it is wrong, or deleted;
• object to, or ask us to restrict, how we use it;
• receive it in a portable format.

Parents and guardians can use these rights on a teenager’s behalf. You can download everything we hold about your account and your teenagers from the Your data section of your dashboard, and delete it there too. For anything else, email contact@oakling11plus.co.uk and we will reply within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

9. Young people’s privacy

We follow the ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code (the Children’s Code), which covers everyone under 18. Teenagers’ accounts are created by a parent and are private by default. There is no chat, no public profile, no leaderboard, no adverts, no location tracking and no feature designed to keep anyone online longer than they need.

10. Keeping data safe

All connections use HTTPS. Passwords, PINs and password-reset links are stored only as hashes. Sign-in attempts are limited, and only the parent who owns a teenager’s account can see their progress. No system is perfectly secure, but if a breach ever put your data at risk, we would tell you and the ICO as the law requires.

11. Changes to this policy

If we make an important change, we will tell parents by email or on the site before it takes effect, and update the date at the top of this page. See also our terms of use.