Safeguarding

Most of the people learning here are children, and every one of their lessons is an hour spent alone with an adult they have never met. That is the fact this whole page is arranged around.

What we promise

What is built into the platform

Policies are promises; these are mechanisms. They apply whether or not anybody remembers the policy.

No camera, ever

Lessons are audio and a shared whiteboard. Video is refused at the server for every participant, so there is no setting to get wrong and no accident to have. A tutor cannot see a child's bedroom, and a child cannot be asked to turn a camera on.

Nothing recorded

No audio or video of any lesson is captured or stored anywhere. What is kept is the whiteboard, the files, the typed messages and who was present — the work and the record, not the room.

A screen is shown only by agreement

In a private lesson a tutor who wants to show a page asks, and the other person decides. In a class the tutor shows it to the room, and everybody in the room is told it is happening. It is marked on every screen the whole time, and it can be stopped instantly.

No screen is shown to anybody under eighteen unless the adult who holds that account has allowed it. That is decided by our server for each person in the room, not by the room: a class carries on for everybody else, the student who has not been authorised simply does not see the screen, and both they and the tutor are told so — nobody is quietly left out of something the rest of the room is looking at.

Contact details do not get through

Phone numbers, email addresses, social handles and links to other messaging apps typed into a lesson chat are refused before they are delivered, and the person is told why. Repeated attempts in one lesson raise a concern for our office automatically. This is the single most important control on the platform, because every other protection described here applies to conversations that happen on TeachCurve and to none that happen on WhatsApp.

The lesson leaves a record

Every session has a record, and both sides can open it: who was in it and when they came and went, the whiteboard, the document that was taught on, the files, the notes and every message typed beside the board. If anybody ever asks what happened in a lesson, there is something to look at rather than two accounts of it.

Files are scanned

An uploaded file is not visible to the other person until it has been scanned and come back clean. Handing an unchecked file from an adult to a child is not a risk worth a few seconds.

Guardian authorisation

Ireland's digital age of consent is 16, and we apply that threshold to everybody wherever they are rather than varying it country by country — it is the strictest of the ages that could apply to us, and one rule is a rule people can rely on. An account belonging to somebody under 16 is created but does not open: we email the parent or guardian, they confirm who they are and what they are agreeing to, and only then can the child sign in.

The adult tells us, in their own name:

• that they are 18 or over;
• that they hold parental responsibility for the child;
• that they have read the terms, the privacy notice and this page.

Each of those is a separate statement, not one tick meaning all three. We record which version of the documents they were shown, and the date. Our office may also telephone them before the first lesson — a person speaking to a named adult is the strongest check available to us, and it is written down when it happens.

A guardian can withdraw authorisation at any time, and the account is switched off when they do. They can also ask for everything we hold about their child, or have it erased.

When somebody doubts an age

A date of birth is typed in by whoever is signing up, and no platform can verify one by looking at it. What we can do is act when somebody tells us otherwise. A tutor spends an hour a week with a student and is a better judge than any automated check we could buy, so there is a button for exactly that. It opens a conversation in our office; it is not an accusation, and what happens next is a person's decision, recorded beside it.

How tutors are chosen — and protected

Tutors are approved subject by subject and level by level before they can teach anything. Profile photographs are checked by a person before they appear anywhere public, because tutor search is open to the world and the people looking at it are children and their parents.

Where a tutor has been vetted, the status and the date it was recorded appear on their public profile, so a parent can see that somebody looked. The vetting body's reference number stays in our office and is never published. A clearance that has run out stops reading as a clearance on the day it expires.

And it faces both ways in practice, not only in principle:

• A tutor can raise a concern about a student, or about a parent who has become abusive, through the same button and into the same queue. A platform where only the paying side can complain protects the paying side and abandons the teacher.
• Nothing is decided about a tutor without a person reading it, and what was decided and why is written down.
• A suspension while something is looked into is not a finding, and we say so. If we got it wrong, we say that too.
• A tutor is never asked to give a student a personal phone number or email address, and should refuse if asked — the platform will refuse it anyway.

Reporting a concern

There is a Report a concern button:

• in every lesson room, beside the door;
• on the record of every session, days or weeks later, which is when most people decide to say something;
• on every tutor's profile;
• in your own account, under Concerns.

When you use it:

• a person at TeachCurve reads it — it does not go to whoever it is about;
• they are never told who raised it;
• nothing happens automatically;
• you can see that it arrived, and you will see what we did about it.

If you tick somebody may be at risk right now, it is emailed to us immediately rather than joining a queue.

What we do when one arrives

1. A person reads it, the same day where it is marked urgent.
2. We look at what there is to look at: the record of the session it concerns, the messages, who was present, and anything else raised about the same account before.
3. We speak to the people involved. Where a child is involved, we speak to their parent or guardian rather than going round them.
4. We decide. That may be nothing, a conversation, a condition on how somebody may teach, or suspending an account while we look further. A suspension can happen immediately and before we have concluded anything, and it is not a finding.
5. We write down what we did and why, next to the concern, and the person who raised it sees that sentence.

When we go outside

Where we believe a child is at risk of harm, we will report it to law enforcement and to the child protection authority responsible where that child lives, and we will co-operate with them fully. We do not need anybody's permission to do that, and we will not delay it while we finish an internal process.

We will normally tell the family that we have done so, unless doing that would put the child at greater risk or we are asked not to.

What we ask of parents

• Use your own email address for the guardian, not your child's. It is the only channel we have to reach an adult.
• Answer the authorisation email, and take our call if we ring. Both exist so that a real adult is known to be behind the account.
• Know that lessons happen in the open: you may sit in on any lesson, and everything kept from one is visible in your child's account.
• Tell your child that nobody on TeachCurve will ever ask them for a phone number, an email address or a social account — and that if anybody does, they should tell you and use the report button.
• If something worries you, however small, say so. We would far rather read a concern that came to nothing.

Report a concern Terms of use Privacy notice