Privacy policy

Last updated 9 August 2026.

Slate is business software for private tutors — the diary, the payments, and the record of a child's tuition. This page explains what we collect, why, and who is responsible for what.

Who is responsible for your data

This matters more than it might seem, and we'd rather be explicit about it than let it stay vague.

If you are a tutor using Slate to run your practice, you are the data controller for the students and payers (usually parents) you add — the law treats you as the one who decided to collect their data and why. Slate is your data processor: we hold and process that data on your instructions, under a data processing agreement, and we don't decide what it's used for beyond running the platform you've asked us to run.

For your own account — your name, email, and how you use Slate — we're the controller, in the ordinary way any software you sign up for is.

If you are a parent or student: your tutor is who you should contact first about your data. We support them in answering you, but the relationship — and the decision to use Slate — is theirs.

What we collect

About a tutor's practice

• Students — a first name and a year group is the minimum the platform needs, and that's deliberate: we don't ask for more just because a field would be easy to add. No home address is collected anywhere in the product.
• Payers (usually a parent) — name and email address, so they can be sent a signed link to pay or manage a lesson without needing to create an account of their own.
• Sessions and progress — what was taught, when, and any notes the tutor records against a lesson.

About a tutor's account

• Name and email, for signing in.
• Payment details for collecting money from their own customers — see "How payments work" below. We do not currently charge tutors a subscription fee that would need its own card details; if that changes, this page will say so.
• If a tutor connects Google Calendar, Outlook, or Xero, we access only what that specific connection needs, and only after they explicitly authorise it.

How payments work

This is the part we're most deliberate about, because it's the part that would be most damaging to get wrong.

Slate never holds or has custody of anyone's money, at any point, even briefly. Payments run through Stripe, and the tutor — not Slate — is the merchant of record. When a parent pays, the money goes directly to the tutor's own Stripe account. We orchestrate the charge; we are never in the chain of custody for the funds themselves.

Card and bank details are collected and stored by Stripe directly, not by us — we never see or store a full card number or bank account number.

Why we hold this data

For a parent or student, everything we process exists to run the tuition arrangement you already have with your tutor — scheduling a lesson, collecting an agreed payment, sending a reminder. We don't use it for marketing, and messages like lesson reminders or "this lesson has moved" notices don't carry an unsubscribe link, because they aren't marketing — they're the service working. If a tutor wants to stop them, they turn the setting off; that's a decision for them to make about their own relationship with their families, not one we make on their behalf.

Automated decisions and AI

We don't currently use AI or any automated process to make a decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you — for example, nothing about pricing, fees, or a child's record is decided by an algorithm rather than by the tutor. Where AI features exist in the product, by design they never create a charge, set a fee, or alter a session — a person always does that. We also don't analyse lesson recordings or transcripts for safeguarding concerns; that isn't something this product does, deliberately, and we'd rather say so than let anyone assume otherwise. If this ever changes we'll update this page and explain it clearly, not fold it in quietly.

Where your data is stored

Our infrastructure providers include Supabase (our database), Stripe (payments), and Cloudflare (hosting and security). We build and run this platform with UK or EU data residency as our standard, and that is our understanding of every provider we currently use. We're still completing a formal, provider-by-provider confirmation of the exact storage region for each one — until that's finished, treat this as our stated intent and current understanding rather than an audited certificate. Where a provider is based outside the UK, we rely on the legal safeguards required for that transfer, such as the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum.

Keeping your data secure

Every tutor's practice is isolated from every other's at the database level — not just in the application, but enforced by the database itself, so a mistake in our code can't leak one practice's data into another's. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Application logs are automatically checked for anything that looks like personal information, and stripped out before being written.

How long we keep it, and deletion

A tutor can download a complete export of their practice's data at any time from Settings. We're still building an automated way for a tutor to fully delete a former student's or payer's record on request — until it's ready, a deletion request is handled by contacting us directly. One genuine constraint worth being upfront about: financial records are kept append-only for accounting accuracy (an entry is never edited or removed, only corrected with a new one), so a "delete" there means removing the personal details attached to an entry rather than the entry itself — the ledger stays intact, the person behind it doesn't.

Cookies and analytics

This website doesn't set cookies. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookie-free and doesn't track you individually across sites — which is also why there's no cookie banner here. The Slate app itself uses only the technical storage needed to keep you signed in.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask to see the data held about you, have it corrected, and in many cases have it deleted or restricted. If you're a parent or student, start with your tutor — they're the controller and we support them in answering you. If you're a tutor asking about your own account data, or you've asked your tutor and want to raise it with us directly, contact us using the details below.

Contact

A dedicated contact address for privacy questions is being set up and will appear here shortly.

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