Terms & Conditions

1 Who we are

BlueAcorn Education is operated by BlueAcorn Education Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17363744, with its registered office at 66 Paul Street, London, England, EC2A 4NA. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean that company; “the platform” means the BlueAcorn Education service at blueacorn.org; and “you” means the school or the person using the platform, as the context requires.

You can contact us at [email protected]. Automated emails from the platform – invitations, assignment notifications and password resets – are sent from a no-reply address and cannot receive replies.

We also run BA Productivity, a companion tool for teachers. The two are separate services with separate terms: signing in to BA Productivity with a BlueAcorn Education account, or exporting work between them, does not change the terms that apply to your use of BA Productivity itself.

By creating or using an account you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the platform.

2 Who these terms apply to

The platform is provided to schools, colleges, academy trusts and local authorities (each a “school”) for use by their authorised users – teachers, senior leaders, administrators and enrolled students.

These terms apply to the school as our customer and to every person who signs in under an account the school has provisioned. Where a school has a separate written agreement with us – a pilot agreement, a data processing agreement or a service contract – that agreement takes precedence to the extent it conflicts with these terms.

If you accept these terms on behalf of a school, you confirm that you are authorised to do so and to bind that school.

Students do not contract with us. A student uses the platform through the account their school has created, under the school’s supervision. Students may not create their own accounts, and we do not market to or contact students directly.

3 Accounts and access

Accounts are created by the school, or by us at the school’s request, and are assigned a role – student, teacher or administrator – which controls what that person can see and do. Users may sign in with an email address and password, or through Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on where the school has enabled it.

Accounts may also have two-factor authentication enabled using an authenticator app. We use security measures including signed-in sessions, rate limiting on sign-in and password-reset endpoints, and a device signal that asks a user to re-enter their password for sensitive actions or when a session appears to move to a different device or browser.

Signing in sets a session cookie so we can keep the user signed in for up to seven days. That cookie is strictly necessary for the platform to work. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Accounts are personal to the individual named on them and must not be shared. The school and each user are responsible for keeping login details secure and for everything done through their account. Tell us at [email protected] straight away if you think an account has been compromised.

A BlueAcorn Education account can also be used to sign in to BA Productivity. When a user does that, they authorise us to confirm their identity and share basic profile details with that service; the user can decline at the consent screen.

4 School responsibilities and student data

“Your content” means everything a school and its users put into the platform: student and staff details, class and enrolment information, assignments, quiz and exercise answers including drawings made on the whiteboard, uploaded resources, and anything typed into the lesson and presentation tools.

In data protection terms, the school is the controller of student personal data and we are a processor acting on the school’s instructions. If a school needs a written processing agreement before use, contact us at [email protected].

The school is also responsible for:

• supervising student use of the platform as is appropriate for the age and needs of its students;
• managing accounts, roles and access, and removing access promptly when a user leaves;
• keeping the personal data it provides accurate and no more than it actually needs.

Please keep student information to the minimum required. In particular, do not enter information about a student’s health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality or any other special category data, or safeguarding records, into free-text fields, uploads or answers.

You also confirm that you have the right to use anything you upload, and that your content does not infringe anyone else’s copyright. Textbook extracts, past papers and other published material are usually protected by copyright, and a school’s copyright licences may not cover uploading them to a third-party service.

The school keeps ownership of its content. You give us a licence to store, copy and process it, and to send it to the third-party providers listed in our Privacy Policy, purely so that we can run the platform for you. That licence ends when the content is deleted or the school’s access ends.

5 Acceptable use

Please use the platform for teaching, learning and school administration, and not for anything else. You agree not to:

• use the platform for anything unlawful, or to create or share material that is harassing, hateful, defamatory, obscene or harmful to children;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to any account, data or system, or access another user’s account or content;
• upload malicious code, or probe, attack or otherwise interfere with the platform or the systems it runs on;
• scrape, bulk-download or otherwise extract the platform’s content or data at scale, or access it by automated means, without our written permission;
• try to extract, copy or reverse-engineer our lesson content, prompts, templates, question banks or model configuration;
• resell or sublicense access to the platform, or use its content or output to build or train a competing product;
• attempt to get around access controls, licence restrictions, watermarking or usage limits;
• use AI marking or feedback to build a profile of a student beyond assessing the work submitted.

We monitor usage at the level we need to run the platform, keep it secure, spot abuse and account for costs. We do not routinely read your content, but we may look at specific content where we reasonably need to investigate a suspected breach of these terms, a security problem or a legal obligation.

6 AI-generated material and AI marking

Where the platform marks a typed answer or reads a drawing or handwritten answer made on the whiteboard, it does so with an AI model. Handwriting and sketch recognition makes mistakes, and a misread answer marks badly. Marks and feedback produced this way carry no academic authority and should never be the sole basis of a grade, a report or a decision about a student. Teachers can review and override them.

Our curriculum is written to align with Department for Education guidance on financial education, but alignment is our own assessment: no exam board, awarding body or government department endorses, approves or checks the platform, and nothing in it is financial, legal or other professional advice.

AI models can produce similar output for different users, so we cannot promise that generated material is original or that it does not resemble someone else’s work. Images and other third-party material shown through the platform come with their own licences and restrictions; check that you are permitted to use an item before publishing or sharing it beyond your school.

7 Curriculum content and presentation licence

While a school has an active subscription, pilot agreement or other agreed access to the platform, we grant that school a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to:

• use, download and display lessons, presentations and other resources provided through the platform for educational purposes within the school;
• share those resources internally with the school’s own teachers, staff and enrolled students.

That licence is subject to the following restrictions:

• resources must not be published, posted or otherwise made available on any publicly accessible website, social media platform, file-sharing service or other open online channel;
• they may only be shared with people who are current teachers, staff or students of the school and who need access for a legitimate educational purpose;
• watermarks, branding and attribution must not be removed, altered or obscured.

When the school’s subscription, agreement or access ends for any reason, this licence ends immediately. The school must stop using, sharing and distributing all resources obtained through the platform and, if we ask, delete or destroy any copies it holds.

Work a school’s own staff author in the platform – their own lesson notes, their own questions, their own uploaded material – remains the school’s and is not affected by the end of this licence.

8 Intellectual property

We own the platform itself – the software, design, curriculum content, lesson library, question banks, prompts and templates – together with everything else we have built. Nothing in these terms transfers any of that to you beyond the licence in section 7. The BlueAcorn Education and BA Productivity names and logos may not be used without our permission.

The school owns its content, as set out in section 4. As between the school and us, material the platform generates from a school’s own inputs is the school’s to use, adapt and share for its own teaching, subject to section 7. We make no claim over it, and we do not warrant that it is free of third-party rights (see section 6).

We may use anonymous, aggregated statistics about how the platform is used to improve it. We do not train any AI model of our own on your content, and the AI provider we use is contractually barred from training its models on what we send it – see our Privacy Policy.

9 Availability and changes

We work to keep the platform running, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free and we do not offer a service level agreement unless one is set out in a separate written agreement with your school. The platform is still developing: features may be added, changed or withdrawn, particularly during pilot and early access phases, and it depends on third-party providers whose own outages can take it down.

Please keep your own copies of anything you rely on. Export or print work that matters to you rather than treating the platform as your only store.

10 Fees and pilot access

Access is arranged with each school directly. Where fees are payable, they are set out in the order form, quote or written agreement with that school, and are payable on the terms stated there. All prices are in pounds sterling and exclusive of VAT unless stated otherwise.

Where a school is taking part in a pilot or early access programme, access may be provided free of charge for an agreed period. Pilot access can be ended by either side on reasonable notice, and continuing beyond the pilot period may require a paid agreement.

We may change our prices for future periods. We will tell your school before any change takes effect, and it can decide not to renew.

11 Suspension and ending the agreement

We may suspend or terminate access to the platform, in whole or in part, if a user seriously or repeatedly breaches these terms, to protect the platform or its users, to comply with the law, to deal with misuse, or if we stop offering the platform. Where it is practicable and appropriate, we will give reasonable notice first and a chance to retrieve work.

A school may ask us to close accounts or delete its data in line with any written agreement it has with us, or by emailing [email protected]. Deletion timescales and retention periods are set out in our Privacy Policy.

When access ends, the licence in section 7 ends with it and the obligations in that section continue to apply.

12 Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded under the law of England and Wales.

Subject to that, and given that the platform is a teaching tool whose AI output you are required to check:

• we are not responsible for loss arising from reliance on AI-generated material or AI marking that a teacher did not review – including incorrect marks, feedback or factual errors in teaching material;
• we are not responsible for loss of content where you have not kept your own copy, though we will of course try to restore it;
• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, contracts, goodwill or reputation;
• we are not liable for anything caused by a third-party service we depend on, by a school’s own systems, or by your breach of these terms;
• our total liability for all claims arising in any 12-month period is limited to the fees paid by the school for the platform in that period, or £1,000 where the platform is provided free of charge.

We will provide the platform with reasonable care and skill. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, the platform is provided “as is” and we exclude all other warranties – including any implied warranty that the platform or its output is accurate, complete or fit for a particular purpose.

13 Privacy

How we handle personal data – what we collect, who else sees it, where it is processed and how long we keep it – is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

14 General

Changes to these terms. We may update these terms as the platform changes. We will post the new version here with a new “last updated” date, and for significant changes we will tell schools by email or in the app before they take effect. Continuing to use the platform after that means you accept the new terms.

Whole agreement. These terms, the Privacy Policy and any written agreement with your school are the whole agreement between us about the platform, and replace anything said beforehand.

Severability. If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

Waiver. If we do not enforce a right straight away, that does not mean we have given it up.

Transfer. You may not transfer your account or these terms to anyone else without our consent. We may transfer them to another company as part of a reorganisation or sale of the business, and will tell you if we do.

Third parties. Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

Links. The platform links to and displays material from other websites. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content.

15 Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes about them, unless the law requires otherwise.

If something has gone wrong, please email [email protected] first – we would much rather sort it out directly.