Terms of use

These terms are the agreement between you and TeachCurve. Using the platform — browsing it while signed in, booking a lesson, teaching one — means you accept them. If you do not, please do not use the platform.

Who we are, and what this covers

TeachCurve is an online tuition platform for the British curriculum: Cambridge International and Pearson Edexcel courses at IGCSE, GCSE, O-Level, AS-Level and A-Level. We connect students with tutors, host the lessons, keep the record of what was taught, and handle payment.

We are not an examination board and we are not a school. We do not enter students for examinations, we cannot award qualifications, and nothing on this platform is endorsed by any awarding body.

Who may have an account

An account is personal. It belongs to one person, and:

• the details on it must be true, including the date of birth;
• the password must not be shared, and neither must the sign-in code we email;
• you are responsible for what is done from your account.

We ask for a date of birth because the law treats a child's data differently from an adult's, and because a tutor teaching a fourteen-year-old should know that is who they are teaching. Giving a false one is a breach of these terms, and if a tutor or anybody else tells us they believe an age is wrong, we will look into it and may ask for it to be confirmed before lessons continue.

If the student is under 16

By authorising an account, a parent or guardian confirms that they:

• are 18 or over and hold parental responsibility for the child;
• have read these terms, the privacy notice and the safeguarding statement, and accept them on the child's behalf;
• agree to the child taking lessons on this platform, and to the data described in the privacy notice being held for that purpose;
• accept responsibility for the child's use of the account, including anything said or shared in a lesson.

Our office may telephone the number a guardian gives us before the first lesson. This is a check that a real adult is behind the account, and it is the strongest one available to us. A guardian may withdraw their authorisation at any time, and the account is switched off when they do.

We record which version of these terms a guardian was shown when they authorised, and the date. If the terms change materially, we ask again.

How lessons work

• Audio and a shared whiteboard. There is no camera. Nobody in a TeachCurve room can turn one on — the server refuses it, for everybody, including us.
• Nothing is recorded. No audio or video of a lesson is captured, stored or made available to anybody, including you and including us. The whiteboard is saved, because it is the student's work.
• A screen can be shown only after the other person agrees. Either side can stop it at any moment, and while it is happening both screens say so.
• Messages typed in a lesson are kept with the record of that lesson, and can be read by our office if a concern is raised about it.
• Files shared in a lesson are scanned before the other person can open them, and are kept with the session.

A tutor may open a room ahead of the booked time by agreement — a lesson taught early is still the lesson you booked and paid for, and appears on your record as taught.

What you agree not to do

These apply to everybody: students, guardians and tutors alike.

• Do not exchange contact details or move the conversation off TeachCurve. Phone numbers, email addresses, social accounts and links to other messaging apps are refused by the platform when typed into a lesson, and arranging tuition privately with somebody you met here is a breach of these terms. This is the single most important rule on the platform: every protection described in these documents applies to conversations that happen here, and to none that happen elsewhere.
• Do not record a lesson by any means, including screen capture, a second device, or software of your own.
• Do not behave abusively, threateningly, or in a way that discriminates against anybody, in a lesson or anywhere else on the platform.
• Do not share, show or upload anything unlawful, or anything unsuitable for a child to see.
• Do not share your account, sell access to it, or use somebody else's.
• Do not attempt to break, probe or overload the platform, or to reach data that is not yours.
• Do not scrape the site or reuse its content commercially without our written permission.
• Do not impersonate anybody, including a member of our staff.

If something happens that does not sit right, tell us. There is a Report a concern button in every lesson room, on every session record and in your account, and it works in both directions — a tutor may raise a concern about a student or a parent exactly as readily as the other way round.

If you teach with us

Tutors provide tuition as independent providers unless a separate written agreement with us says otherwise. You are responsible for your own tax and for holding any registration your own jurisdiction requires of you.

In addition to everything above, teaching here means:

• you teach only subjects and levels we have approved you for;
• you agree to vetting checks where we ask for them, and to tell us if your circumstances change in a way that would affect one;
• you keep to the safeguarding expectations in our safeguarding statement;
• you never contact a student privately, and never arrange, encourage or accept tuition with a student off the platform;
• the material you teach with is yours to use, and you do not reproduce past examination papers here.

Earnings, the share you receive and when you are paid are shown in your account. We may withhold a payment while a safeguarding or payment concern is being looked into, and we will tell you if we do.

Paying, cancelling and refunds

• Prices are shown before you commit, and include any tax we are required to charge.
• A one-to-one lesson is held for you when a tutor offers it and you accept, and is confirmed when it is paid for.
• A lesson cancelled more than 12 hours before it starts is refunded in full. Inside 12 hours it is not, because the tutor has held the hour and turned other work away.
• If a tutor cancels, or does not appear, you are refunded in full or the lesson is rescheduled — whichever you prefer.
• If a lesson is cut short or ruined by a fault on our side, tell us and we will put it right, by refund or by replacing it.
• Where you have a statutory right to cancel a purchase, that right stands and nothing here reduces it. Starting a lesson within a cancellation period is a request for the service to begin.

Suspending and closing accounts

You may close your account at any time from Settings. You can also ask us to erase what we hold, and we will, keeping only what the law requires us to keep — the privacy notice sets out exactly what that is.

We may suspend or close an account:

• while a safeguarding concern about it is being looked into;
• if these terms are broken, particularly the rules about contact details, recording and abuse;
• if we believe an account belongs to a child whose guardian has not authorised it;
• if a guardian withdraws their authorisation.

A suspension is a decision a person makes and writes down, not something the platform does by itself. If you think one was wrong, tell us and it will be looked at again. Lessons already paid for and not yet taught are refunded if we end an account and the fault is not yours.

Who owns what

• The platform, the site and everything we have written for them remain ours.
• What a tutor writes and teaches remains the tutor's.
• What a student produces — their answers, their submitted work, their side of a whiteboard — remains the student's. We keep a copy so that the record of the lesson is complete, and the student keeps access to it.
• Past examination papers remain the copyright of the awarding bodies and are not reproduced here. All practice material on TeachCurve is original and written to the published syllabus.

What we are and are not responsible for

Beyond that:

• We do not guarantee results. Tuition helps; it does not promise a grade, an offer, or a place. No prediction of a mark on this platform is a forecast of an examination result.
• We are not responsible for what happens off the platform. If you exchange contact details against these terms and arrange something privately, that arrangement is entirely between you and the other person, and none of the protections described here apply to it.
• Tutors are responsible for the tuition they give. We choose who may teach, approve their subjects, and act on concerns — but the teaching itself is theirs.
• We are not liable for things outside our control: your internet connection, your device, a failure at a third party we depend on, or an event nobody could reasonably have prevented.
• Where we are liable for something that goes wrong with a lesson or a purchase, our liability is limited to the amount you paid for it, except where the law says otherwise.
• We do not exclude our responsibilities under data protection law, and we do not ask you to waive any right you have under it. Any clause that appeared to do so would not be effective and is not intended.

Changes to these terms

We change these terms when the platform changes. Each version has a number and a date, both at the top of this page. If a change materially affects you we will tell you in the platform before it takes effect, and where a child's account is involved we ask the guardian again rather than assuming their earlier answer still holds.

Law and complaints

These terms are governed by the law of Ireland, and the courts of Ireland have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living elsewhere, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in.

Tell us about a problem first — most are fixable and we would rather fix them. Use the form on the front page, or Settings if you have an account. If a complaint is about how we handle personal data and you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland or to the supervisory authority where you live.

Create an account Read the privacy notice