Four people, one record
Nobody around a child knows the whole of them
You see the homework at the kitchen table. Their teacher sees them in a class of thirty. They know which bit they actually understood.
At a glance
Who sees what, and who writes what
Access is a school's for as long as it teaches the child. Ownership is not.
| Person | Sees | Writes |
|---|---|---|
| Student | Today's work, what helps them, their own progress | How a task went, self-assessment, goals |
| Parent | Trends, development areas, and the evidence behind each one | Profile, results, homework, observations |
| Teacher | Their own pupils, class patterns, who needs support this week | Observations, assessments, feedback |
| School | Their own cohort, for planning support | — |
The student
Opens it and finds today, not a verdict
The child's lens shows what to do next and what has helped before. It does not show development areas, and not because a screen hides them — the server does not send them to a child's app at all.
A seven-year-old opening an app about themselves and reading a list of their weaknesses is a specific, foreseeable harm, and it is the kind that gets built by accident when the same page is reused for everybody.
The record is written about them from five. They gain rights over it at thirteen and full control at eighteen, and every feature is designed so that handover is possible rather than retrofitted afterwards.
The parent
Holds the record, and can check every word of it
The account is yours, the record belongs to your family, and every claim in it opens onto the assessments, homework and notes it was drawn from. If you disagree with a finding, you can go and read what it was built on rather than argue with a summary.
What you write is yours to write. A note saying “the school mentioned dyslexia in the meeting today” is a family recording its own life, and it is stored exactly as typed — the guard that stops the product naming a condition runs over what EleMate writes, never over what you do.
Deleting a child deletes everything: profile, assessments, homework, observations, findings, packs, and anything the model wrote. Not archived, not hidden. Gone.
You writeResults, homework, and what you noticed at the time.
You checkThe records under every claim, whenever you want them.
You deleteAll of it, in one go, with nothing kept back.
The teacher
Sees their own class, and never a league table of it
A teacher gets access to their own pupils, because that is what teaching a class requires. The class view answers one question — who needs me this week — and it is built from what each of those children has recorded.
What it never becomes is an input. Nothing the class view knows is allowed to shape what EleMate says about an individual: no cohort average, no percentile, no ranking, no “children like this one”. A judgement about a child is built from that child's own records or it is not made.
The reason is not squeamishness. The moment a claim about a seven-year-old is derived from the other twenty-nine in the room, it stops being about them and starts being about where they sit — and that is the sentence that follows a child up the school.
The school
Gets the cohort it teaches, for as long as it teaches them
A school sees its own cohort, for planning support. That is a genuine need and this is built to serve it.
It is also a grant rather than a transfer. The record does not become the school's because the school can read it, and when the child leaves, the access ends and the record stays with the family. Nothing in the product depends on that being the other way round.
This is the part every incumbent structurally cannot do, and not through any fault of theirs: their contract is with a school, and a school's interest in a child ends the summer they leave.