Lessons

Recording & Consent

Effective 5 September 2026 · Last updated 5 September 2026

1. Why we record at all

A child who did not follow something the first time can watch the moment again in their own time, at their own pace, without having to ask an adult to explain it twice. A parent who could not sit in can see how the lesson went. That is the whole purpose. Recordings are not used to assess tutors without their knowledge, are not used for marketing, and are not used to train any machine-learning system.

2. When a lesson is recorded

Recording is off by default and never starts on its own. There is no automatic recording, no setting that records everything, and no recording of a room nobody has entered.

A lesson is recorded only when a person in the room deliberately starts it — normally the tutor. If nobody starts it, no recording of that lesson exists.

3. How you know it is happening

The classroom shows every participant that recording has started, and shows it for as long as it continues. This is not a line buried in a menu: it appears on screen to everybody, including a child on a phone. When recording stops, that is shown too.

If you or your child are ever in a lesson and cannot tell whether it is being recorded, ask the tutor to stop and confirm. That is a reasonable thing to ask and no tutor of ours will object to it.

4. What a recording contains

A recording captures what the classroom showed and what was said in it: the video and audio of whoever had their camera or microphone on, anything shared on screen, and the whiteboard as it was written on.

It therefore contains your child's face and voice, and the face and voice of anyone else in the lesson. We treat recordings as the most sensitive thing this service holds, and everything below follows from that.

5. Where recordings are kept

On a server we operate ourselves in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Recordings are not uploaded to YouTube, Google Drive, Zoom, Dropbox or any other third-party service, and no third party is given access to them.

Our classroom software runs on that same machine, and — unlike the rest of the site — the classroom is deliberately not routed through any content network. Live lesson video and audio go straight between the participants and our server. Nobody else's systems carry the video of your child's lesson.

6. Who can watch one

• The child whose lesson it was.
• Their parents or guardians.
• The tutor who taught that lesson — not other tutors.
• Us, where it is needed to run the service, or to look into something you have raised.

A sibling cannot watch another child's lesson. Nobody outside the household and the teaching tutor is given access, and recordings are not published anywhere.

7. How long they are kept

Recordings are deleted automatically 90 days after the lesson. This happens on its own — you do not have to ask, and nobody has to remember.

Ninety days is long enough to revise a term's work and short enough that a video of a child does not sit on a disk for years. If you would like a particular recording kept longer, ask us before it expires; if you would like all of them deleted sooner, see below.

8. Consent, and how to refuse

For a child, consent is the parent's or guardian's to give. Adding your child to the service does not by itself consent to recording — it is a separate thing, and you can decide it separately.

To refuse recording entirely: email [email protected] and say that your child's lessons are not to be recorded. We will mark it against that child and tell their tutors. It applies from then on, to every lesson, and you never need to raise it again. Your child's lessons carry on exactly as before in every other respect — refusing recording is not a reason for us to teach them differently, and it costs nothing.

You may also change your mind in either direction whenever you like.

9. Deleting a recording early

Ask us and we will delete any recording, or all of them, without asking you why. Email [email protected]. We will confirm who you are, delete it from the live service straight away, and confirm that we have.

Copies inside existing backups fall out as those backups expire, within 14 days. We tell you this rather than claiming an instant and total erasure that no honest system can promise.

10. Recording law

Recording law differs by state and by country, and our tutors and families are not always in the same one. Rather than work out which rule applies to each lesson, we do the thing that satisfies the strictest: everyone in the room is told, on screen, every time.

Where a person is in a place whose law requires that all parties agree before a conversation is recorded, being shown the notice and remaining in the lesson is how that agreement is given. Anyone who does not agree may ask for recording to be stopped, or leave — and for a child, the parent's instruction to us settles it in advance so the child is never put in that position.

11. Rules for everyone in the room

These apply to parents, children, tutors and staff alike, and they are part of our Terms:

• Do not make your own recording of a lesson — no screen recorders, no phone pointed at the screen, no third-party tools. If you want a lesson recorded, ask for it to be recorded properly, where the retention rules and the on-screen notice apply.
• Do not share a recording outside the household. It contains another person's child.
• Do not post any part of a lesson to social media or anywhere public.
• Do not use a recording for anything other than the child's own learning.

We take these seriously. A person who circulates a recording of somebody else's child will lose access to the service, and we will tell the affected family.