Privacy & the rules
What we hold, and what we refuse to do with it
A record that follows a child for twenty years is only worth having if the rules around it hold. So this is not at the bottom of the page in grey.
The rules
The four that decide who the record is for
The first six are about what it may say about a child. These four are about who holds it.
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An adult opens a child's account
Under-13s cannot consent to this, so the consent is yours. No child sign-up, no email address on a child record, and no reset that reaches a child directly.
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Control shifts to the young person as they grow
The record is written about them from five. They gain rights over it at thirteen and full control at eighteen, so every feature has to make that handover possible.
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The record outlives the school
Your family owns it, and it follows your child across every phase boundary. A school submits to it and reads it under a grant that ends when it stops teaching your child.
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Deleting a child deletes everything
Profile, assessments, homework, observations, findings, holiday packs, and anything the model wrote. Not archived, not hidden. Gone.
Built in, not remembered
Decisions that hold when nobody is paying attention
A rule that lives in somebody's memory lasts until the week they are busy.
A child is not an account
Every email, invitation and password reset in a system reads from the accounts table. Children are not in it, so there is no address to send to. Not hidden, not suppressed — the column does not exist. A child has no password and no passcode either — a grown-up signs their device in by scanning a code, so there is no secret for a child to hold, forget, or have taken off them.
Only what the purpose needs
A first name and a date of birth opens a record. We ask for pronouns rather than a gender category, because all the product needs is to refer to your child correctly. There are no photographs of children anywhere in it.
Nothing is inferred from another child
No cohort model, no percentile, no ranking, no “children like yours”. A teacher's access to their own class must never become an input to what the system says about one child. Not yours, and not anybody else's.
Nobody is reading it as you write it
The notes you write are yours, and no one at EleMate is watching them for anything. If you are worried a child is at risk, the people who can help are the NSPCC on 0808 800 5000 and Childline on 0800 1111. In an emergency, call 999.
No advertising, ever
No advertising here, nothing about a child sold or shared, and no profile of a child built for anybody's commercial purpose. What a seven-year-old finds difficult is not an audience segment.
Before any real child
An impact assessment comes first, and it is not done yet
Profiling children is high risk under the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code, and this profiles children by design. So an impact assessment is required before one real child's data goes in, and it has not been written yet.
Everything in the prototype today is invented data about an invented family.
This page states plainly how the product is built. The formal privacy notice, and the lawful basis for each thing we hold, come before the doors open.
This website
What the page you are reading collects
If you fill in the interest form
The name and email address you type, and the date you typed them. That is the whole record, and it is used for one thing: to write to you when there is something real to look at.
Not a marketing list, not sold, not shared. Ask at hello@elemate.co.uk and we delete the row rather than flagging it as unsubscribed.
Everything else
No analytics, no advertising pixel, and nothing that follows you to another site. What is there: two cookies of our own, so a form can tell it is still you between one page and the next, and one set by the network in front of us to tell people apart from bots. Clearing your cookies for this site removes all three.
Typefaces come from Google Fonts, so your browser fetches them from Google. If that matters to you, blocking it leaves this site perfectly readable.
Questions about any of this, or a request to see or delete what we hold, go to hello@elemate.co.uk.