🦁 Privacy Notice
Last updated: September 2026. Shumba Tutor is a study helper for UK school pupils. It supports school learning — it doesn’t replace it.
For children (the short version)
- Shumba Tutor only knows what you type into it and how you do on quizzes, lessons and practice papers.
- Your parent or carer can see how you are getting on: which subjects you work on, your quiz and mock results, when you last used the app, and the lessons you have saved, and the conversations you have with the tutor (they are saved so you can go back to them). They can also set study times and send you kind notes.
- No other children can see your work. There is no chatting with other children and no way for strangers to contact you. The person who runs Shumba can look at accounts if something needs fixing, and your questions are sent to an AI service to get an answer.
- The tutor is a computer program (AI). It can make mistakes, so check important things with your teacher. It is a study helper, not a friend or a counsellor.
- If you type something that suggests you might be upset or unsafe, Shumba shows you a message with people who can help, such as Childline on 0800 1111 (free, any time). Your parent is told that this happened but not what you wrote.
- Please never type your address, phone number, school name, passwords or photos of people.
Who is responsible for your data
Shumba Tutor is run by its administrator (the “we” in this notice), who decides how and why personal data is used. Contact: tdmany@outlook.com.
What we collect and why
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Parent: name, email, password (stored securely by Google Firebase, never by us), approval status, notification choices | To run the parent account and keep children safe |
| Child: name, email, year group, linked parent(s), consent record | To run the child’s account and link it to their parent |
| Learning data: subjects, lessons, quiz and mock results, mastery scores, essay marks, saved sessions including tutor chats, mistakes | To personalise teaching and show progress to the child and their parent |
| Usage data: last seen, minutes studied per day, time-limit settings, goals, an approximate count of AI usage | So parents can support healthy study habits and we can keep the service running |
| Safety data: a timestamp when the wellbeing message was shown (never what was typed) | To tell parents that a check-in may help |
We do not sell data, show adverts, or build profiles for marketing.
How the AI is used
- What a child types, and any photos or PDFs they choose to upload for marking, is sent through our secure service to Anthropic’s Claude to produce the reply. Please do not upload photos containing faces or personal details.
- Every request carries strict safety instructions for talking with children. The app also runs simple checks that look for personal information and for signs a child may be upset, and shows a warning or a help message. These checks are helpful but not perfect, so they cannot be relied on to catch everything, and they do not run on every box a child can type in.
- Under Anthropic’s commercial API terms in force when this notice was written, data sent through the API is not used to train its models. We check this when our terms or theirs change.
- Parents can ask for a written weekly summary. It is created only from scores, topics and totals — never from a child’s own words.
Who can see data
- The child, and the parent(s) or carer(s) linked to them (a child can have up to four).
- The administrator, for safety, support and running the service.
- Our service providers: Google Firebase (accounts and database), Amazon Web Services (hosting and email), Anthropic (AI replies). Our pages also load text styles (fonts) from Google, which means a device’s internet address is visible to Google when a page opens.
Parent consent for under-13s
Children under 13 cannot create their own account. A parent or legal guardian creates it, confirms they are the child’s parent or guardian, and agrees to this notice on the child’s behalf. Children aged 13 or over may sign up themselves with a family code, and the account stays on hold until their parent approves it.
Keeping and deleting data
We keep data while an account is active. A parent can, from the dashboard, download all of a child’s data, pause the account, or delete the account and its data (this also removes the login). Ask the administrator for anything you cannot do yourself.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask to see, correct, download or delete your (or your child’s) data, object to how it is used, and complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).
Cookies
We use no advertising or tracking cookies. Your browser stores a sign-in session and a few settings so the app works.
This notice is written in plain English to be understood by families. It is not legal advice; the administrator should have it reviewed before wider use.