For parents and guardians

What we ask for

Every learner account needs an invitation code, from a teacher or from us. To sign up, your child gives an email address, a password, their date of birth and their country, and chooses an alias. If we need your consent, they also give us your name and email address.

Signing up never asks for your child's real name, a photo, a phone number, a home address or their school. Asking us for an invitation takes a name and an email address, and a phone number only if you choose to give one.

We keep the date of birth and country only for children who need a parent's consent. For everyone else we keep only the result of the age check and the region it used, such as "Switzerland".

Everything we keep is listed in our Privacy Policy.

What other learners see

Your child chooses an alias when they sign up. Like a player name in a game or a username on social media, it lets them take part without giving their real name. Other learners see the alias, never your child's email address, date of birth or country. In squad games they also see a score and, if set, an "Under 16" or "Over 18" badge and an English-background badge: the list of players shows both, the scoreboard only the English-background badge.

The English-background badge helps put a score in context: someone whose first language is English will usually score higher than someone still learning it. Each learner chooses their own badges, and we don't check them.

In the list of players, a parent's account always shows "Over 18". On the boards, posts never show "Under 16" or an English-background badge; a post can show "Over 18" when its author has that badge.

An alias can be 3 to 12 letters, numbers, hyphens or underscores, with at most four numbers, and a name that includes a word from our short list of blocked words is refused. The sign-up screen asks your child not to use their real name, a phone number or a social media name. We can't check that it isn't their real name or a social media name, so you may want to help them choose it. If they change it later in Settings, their posts show the new name, and we keep a record of the old one.

There are no private messages and no chat, and learners can't send each other photos or files. Squad games are played with up to three others who have the game's code.

Posting on the boards

Each study group has a board for short posts, and there is one board shared by everyone on WordRunner, adults included. A post is a short title and up to 1,000 characters of text, and a learner can post up to three times an hour.

Before a post appears, our server checks it automatically:

• a post with an email address, a phone number, a social-media username starting with @ or a UK postcode is refused
• a post with a web link, a street address written like "12 High Street" or "Bahnhofstrasse 12", a Swiss postcode written like "CH-8001", or a username written after "insta:", "snap:", "ig:" or "discord:" waits until a teacher or our team approves it
• a post with a word from a short list (swear words, slurs, the names of four social apps, and phrases such as "add me on") is refused

If five of a learner's posts are refused within an hour, posting pauses for up to an hour.

The checks only catch the usual patterns. They miss phone numbers and email addresses written in words or split up in unusual ways, short local phone numbers, usernames written without the @ or one of those prefixes, addresses and postcodes written in other ways, and some web links. They can't spot a full name, a school or a meeting place.

Teachers and our team can take posts down. A learner can't delete their own post.

If something worries you

If anything your child sees in the app worries you or them, contact us.