Last updated: June 2026

1. Who we are and what this notice covers

Study Mind Limited (“Study Mind”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 10871191, with its registered office at Regus Express, 1st Floor, Beaconsfield Services Accountants, HP9 2SE. We provide online and in-person education services for students.

This notice explains how we collect and use your personal data when you use our website at www.studymind.co.uk and when you use our services. It applies to everyone who interacts with us, whether you are a student, a parent or guardian, a tutor, or another visitor to our site.

It covers the services where Study Mind decides how and why your data is used, in other words where we are the controller: the Medic Mind university admissions service, our general tuition for subjects such as GCSE, A-level and 11+, our online courses and live classroom days, and our Summer Camps.

Our Alternative Provision service works differently. Where a student is referred to us by a Local Authority, the Local Authority is the controller for that student’s data, and Study Mind acts as a processor, handling the data on the Local Authority’s instructions. If your child receives Alternative Provision through a council, the council’s own privacy information explains how their data is used, and you can also contact us using the details at the end of this notice.

We handle personal data in line with the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and, for electronic marketing, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. This notice should be read together with our Cookie Policy.

2. The personal data we collect

2.1 Information you give us

• Account information: such as your name, email address, telephone number, WhatsApp number and date of birth, and whether you register as a parent, student, school pupil or tutor.
• Tutor identity and right to work: if you apply to tutor with us, verification that you study where you say you do, a valid form of identification, a DBS check where applicable, and evidence of your right to work in the UK.
• Tutor application details: your educational background and qualifications, the subjects you tutor, your profile picture and video interview, and your gender.
• Communication history: records of your contact with other users and with our team, including jobs posted and applied for, messages, and contact by SMS and telephone. This includes recordings of telephone calls and of online tutoring sessions, which we keep for safeguarding and quality purposes.
• Summer Camps and residential programmes: for camps and residential or off-site activities we collect additional information such as passport details, emergency contacts, medical information, dietary requirements, travel arrangements and supervision notes. Only the information necessary for a student’s safety and support is shared with the partners involved.

2.2 Information we collect automatically

When you use our website we collect cookie information, your IP address, details of the device you use, the pages you visit and actions you take, and the dates and times of those actions. We use cookies and similar technologies to run the website, keep it secure and understand how it is used. Cookies that need your consent, such as analytics and marketing cookies, are set only where you have given permission. Our Cookie Policy explains this in full.

2.3 Information we receive from others

• School partnerships: if you are a pupil registered with us through a school partnership, your teacher shares the information needed to set up tutoring, such as your development areas, target grades, school, year group and any specific requirements. Your tutor shares feedback on your progress with your teachers, and, where it helps your learning, with other tutors teaching you.
• Reviews: students can rate tutors after lessons. If you are a tutor, these ratings are shared with you and shown on your public profile.
• Other sources: where the law allows, we may collect information about you from other third parties.

2.4 Payment information

To take or make payments we collect financial information. For tutors this includes your nominated bank account, invoices and payment history. For customers it includes your payment history and payment card details. When you pay for, or are paid for, services, we pass the information needed to complete the transaction to the banks and payment providers involved. We do not share financial information with third parties for other purposes without your consent, except where it is needed to prevent fraud.

2.5 Special category and more sensitive data

Some of the data we handle is more sensitive. This includes information about health, special educational needs and disabilities, EHCP details, ethnicity where a commissioner asks us to record it, and safeguarding concerns. We process this data only where it is necessary, and only where an additional condition under the UK GDPR applies, normally:

• the explicit consent of the parent or carer, or of an adult learner;
• a substantial public interest, including safeguarding children and adults at risk; or
• a legal obligation connected to education or Local Authority reporting.

We apply extra safeguards to this data, including restricted access and additional security.

3. How we use your data, and our lawful bases

We use your personal data for the purposes below. For each one we rely on a lawful basis under the UK GDPR.

• Providing our services: creating and managing your account, enabling tutors to build a profile, arranging bookings between students and tutors, taking payments, and supporting students and tutors. Lawful basis: performance of a contract.
• Keeping our services safe and working well: ensuring quality, understanding how the website is used so we can improve it, preventing fraud and misuse, and recording lessons and calls for safeguarding. Lawful basis: our legitimate interests.
• Safeguarding: meeting our duties to keep children and young people safe. Lawful basis: legal obligation, and substantial public interest for sensitive data.
• Marketing: telling registered users about our services, offers, referral codes and surveys, by email and other digital channels. Lawful basis: consent, or our legitimate interests where the law allows, and you can opt out at any time.
• Meeting our legal duties: for example DBS checks, payroll, accounting and statutory reporting. Lawful basis: legal obligation.
• Protecting people in an emergency: very occasionally we may use data to protect someone’s life. Lawful basis: vital interests.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we balance our interests against your rights and freedoms, and we complete and record a Legitimate Interests Assessment.

4. Children and young people

Many of the students we work with are children. We follow the ICO’s Children’s code, also known as the Age Appropriate Design Code. In practice this means that privacy settings are set high by default, we do not profile children unnecessarily, we explain clearly to parents, carers and learners how data is used, we apply safety measures to online lessons and platforms, and we collect only the data we need.

Where we rely on consent to process a child’s data, we obtain parental consent for children under the age of 13, except where the data is provided directly by a school or a Local Authority. For most of our services, however, our lawful basis is a contract or a legal duty rather than consent.

5. Marketing and your choices

We send service messages that are necessary to deliver what you have asked for, and these are not marketing. Separately, we send optional marketing about our services, offers, referral codes and surveys. You can opt out of marketing at any time, without affecting the services you receive, by using the unsubscribe link in our emails, or by emailing info@studymind.co.uk with “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line.

6. Who we share your data with

6.1 Other users of our site

To deliver tutoring, some information is shared between students and tutors. If you are a student requesting tutoring, a tutor will see the information needed to help you, such as your first name and the initial of your surname, your subject requirements and your telephone number. If you are a tutor, the profile information you publish, such as your first name, university, qualifications, experience, picture, video, subjects and reviews, can be seen by users of the site. Messages sent between users may be monitored by us to meet our safeguarding duties.

6.2 Our service providers

We use trusted third parties to run our services, and we share with them only the data they need. They include analytics providers, payment providers, communication platforms for email, text and in-app messaging, marketing platforms, business operations tools, accounting and finance platforms, customer support platforms, cloud hosting and secure storage services, and online learning and video conferencing tools. We may also share essential information with agencies supporting Alternative Provision, EHCP support or safeguarding, and with residential and work experience partners who need health, safety or travel information. All of these providers are bound by written data processing agreements.

6.3 Legal and safeguarding disclosures

We may share personal data without consent where there is a safeguarding concern, in line with our statutory duties under Keeping Children Safe in Education, Working Together to Safeguard Children, and Local Authority procedures. Information is shared only on a need-to-know basis with authorised bodies such as schools, Local Authorities, the police or social care, and we will tell the individual where it is appropriate and safe to do so. We may also disclose data where the law requires it, to assist law enforcement, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Study Mind, our users or others.

6.4 Other websites

Our site may link to other websites. We are not responsible for their privacy or cookie practices, and we encourage you to read their notices.

7. Sending data outside the UK

Some of our administrative and customer support work is carried out by team members based outside the UK, and some of the providers we use store data outside the UK. Where we transfer personal data outside the UK, we make sure it is protected by an appropriate safeguard. This may be a UK adequacy decision for the country concerned, or the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, supported by additional security measures. We assess these transfers so that your data continues to be protected to UK standards.

8. How we keep your data safe

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data. These include individual accounts with multi-factor authentication, access limited to staff who need it for their role, encryption of data in transit and at rest, secure configuration of our systems, and regular staff training. Please be aware that ordinary email is not a secure way to send sensitive information; if you need to share something sensitive, please contact us to arrange a secure method.

If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to affect you, we follow our breach response procedure, and where the law requires it we will notify the ICO and inform affected individuals.

9. How long we keep your data

We keep personal data only for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this notice. We hold a full retention schedule that sets out the period for each type of record. The main periods are:

• Account data: kept for a defined period after you were last active with us, currently five years, after which it is deleted unless we have a specific reason to keep it longer.
• Safeguarding records: kept in line with statutory guidance, often until the individual reaches the age of 25.
• Financial records: kept for six years, in line with HMRC requirements.
• Tutor right to work and engagement records: kept for the period of engagement and a period afterwards as required by law.
• Lesson and call recordings: kept only for safeguarding and quality purposes, and deleted at the end of their retention period.
• Alternative Provision records: kept for the period set by the relevant Local Authority, and returned or deleted on the Local Authority’s instruction.

10. Your rights

You have rights over your personal data, including the right to be informed about how we use it, which this notice provides; the right of access, to ask for a copy of the data we hold about you; the right to rectification, to have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected; the right to erasure, to ask us to delete your data in certain circumstances; the right to restrict processing; the right to object to processing; the right to data portability; and rights relating to automated decision-making.

Some rights, including erasure, do not apply in every case. We may need to keep certain records, for example safeguarding and financial records, or Alternative Provision records held for a Local Authority. There is no charge for exercising your rights, and we respond within one calendar month. To make a request, contact us at info@studymind.co.uk. For Alternative Provision students, requests are passed to the relevant Local Authority as the controller, and we assist it in responding.

11. Automated decision-making

We do not make decisions about you by solely automated means that have a legal or similarly significant effect. Some processes, such as suggesting tutor matches, involve limited automated analysis, but a person is always involved.

12. How to contact us 

If you have any questions about this notice, or you wish to exercise your rights, please contact us:

Study Mind Limited  |  Regus Express, 1st Floor, Beaconsfield Services Accountants, HP9 2SE  |  Telephone: +44 (0) 20 3305 9593  |  Email: info@studymind.co.uk

We take any concerns seriously and would like the chance to put things right, so please contact us 

13. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice from time to time. We review it at least once a year, and sooner if there is a change in the law, in ICO guidance, or in how we operate. The date at the top of this notice shows when it was last updated.