For schools Last checked 20 October 2026
Data protection pack
What BrightWren holds about children and families, why, who else handles it, and how it is kept safe. Written for a school's data protection lead.
Not Another Studio Ltd
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- None
- of a child's real name, birthday, school or photo is collected
- 0
- third-party adverts, and no trackers in the app
- EU
- where the app's database is kept
- 14 days
- until a removed child has left our backups
This is the short version a school's data protection lead usually asks for. It covers the free practice on the BrightWren website and the BrightWren Plus app. The full wording is on our privacy notice; this page is the same facts, arranged as answers.
Who is responsible
Not Another Studio Ltd makes and runs BrightWren. It is a company registered in England and Wales, number 12799774, with its registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. BrightWren is the name it trades under. We are the data controller for everything on this page, and we have paid the Information Commissioner's Office data protection fee. We have not appointed a data protection officer: our assessment is that the law does not require us to.
Questions about data, and requests to see or remove it, go to privacy@brightwren.co.uk.
The short version
- The free practice on the website holds nothing about a child. No account, no sign-in. Practice levels stay in the browser on the child's own device.
- The app is set up by a grown-up at home, not by a school. A grown-up holds the account and a child practises inside it under a nickname. A school does not create pupil accounts, and we hold no pupil lists.
- We never collect a child's real name, birthday, school, address, photo, email or phone number. There is nowhere in the app to enter them. A nickname is chosen by the grown-up, is limited to 24 characters, and our terms ask them not to use a real name.
- No third-party advertising, no selling, no sharing for marketing. The app has no third-party trackers. The website counts visits through Vercel, without cookies, and anyone can switch that off.
- No special category data. Nothing about health, ethnicity or anything of that kind, and nowhere to enter it.
Our legal basis
For what the app needs to work (the account, each child's profile and their answers), the basis is contract: the grown-up asked us to provide it. The two optional emails rest on consent, recorded with its date. Counting visits to the website, mistake reports and the broken-page notes rest on our legitimate interest in knowing the service works. So do the totals we add up to see how families get started and come back, and the optional answer to "How did you hear about BrightWren?", where the interest is in knowing which routes bring families.
What the app holds
| What | About | Why we hold it | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email address | The grown-up | It is the account. There is no password: we email a code to sign in. We also write to you about the account: a welcome, help getting started, how the beta is going, and anything that goes wrong. | With the account |
| Date and version of the terms they agreed to | The grown-up | A record, in case the terms change. | With the account |
| How they heard about us: one optional choice from a short list, nothing typed | The grown-up | To count which routes bring families, as totals. Skipping it changes nothing. | With the account |
| A nickname, a picture from a fixed set, and a school year | The child | To tell one child's work from another's. | Until the child is removed |
| Each answer: question type, difficulty, right or wrong, when | The child | It is the product. It decides the next question and what the grown-up sees. | Until the child is removed |
| Trophies, adventure progress, and which years are open | The child and the grown-up | To show what has been done. | Until the child is removed |
| Which two optional emails they asked for, and when | The grown-up | Consent has to be recorded to count. Both are off unless ticked. | With the account |
| A report of something wrong, with an internal account reference | The grown-up (a child's report has no reference) | To be able to answer them. | Reference cleared if the account is deleted |
| A note when a page breaks: the error, the page, the kind of device | Nothing that names anyone (a grown-up's page adds an internal account reference) | To fix it. | 90 days, then the database deletes it |
A grown-up can also leave an email address on the Apps or Classroom page to be told when something launches. That address is kept separately from any account, is meant for adults only, and is removed whenever the person asks.
On this website, each page visit is counted for us by Vercel, which uses no cookies. We only see totals, and anyone can switch it off on the privacy page.
Who else handles it
Apart from one use by Cloudflare, described below the table, these companies act on our behalf, under contract, and do nothing else with the data.
| Who | What they do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Holds the app's database and runs sign-in | European Union |
| Vercel | Hosts both sites, and counts visits to the website | A United States company. Both sites are static files served from the nearest location to the visitor. |
| Resend | Delivers the sign-in emails. Keeps a delivery record for up to 30 days. | United States |
| Cloudflare | Forwards mail sent to our contact addresses. Also runs a check that a person is asking for a sign-in code, which is normally switched off and used only while sign-in is being misused. | A United States company |
Cloudflare is responsible itself for one use of the sign-in check: improving its own bot detection. Its own notice explains this, and our privacy notice links to it.
Transfers outside the UK and EU (Resend, Cloudflare and Vercel) rest on those companies' own contract terms and safeguards.
How it is kept safe
- Every table of family data is locked to its own account inside the database itself, so one family can never read another's.
- The key the app ships with can do nothing on its own. Every write goes through a function that checks who is asking, and there are limits on how fast anything can be added.
- A copy of the database is taken each day to an encrypted studio computer and kept for 14 days. Nothing is copied anywhere else, and a restore has been tested.
- Nothing about a child is sent to an outside company to be analysed or profiled.
Seeing it, correcting it, deleting it
A grown-up can change a nickname or school year in the app, and can remove a child or close the whole account there. Removing deletes every answer, trophy and record for that child. It is not hidden, it is removed. The daily copies still hold it until they expire, within 14 days.
Anyone can email privacy@brightwren.co.uk to ask for a copy of what we hold, a correction or a deletion. To protect the account, we ask that a request comes from the email address it was made with. We reply within one calendar month, free of charge.
If something goes wrong
If personal data were lost or exposed, we would tell the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours of finding out, unless it was unlikely to put anyone at risk. If the risk to families was high, we would tell them directly, in plain words, as soon as we could. We keep a written record of every incident, including any we decide not to report.
How this was assessed
We completed a data protection impact assessment in September 2026, as the law asks of any online service for children, and we update it whenever something it covers changes. It assesses the service against the Information Commissioner's Children's Code. The app is built to ask for as little as it can, and has no way for a child to be contacted.
If we charge for premium features
The app is free while it is in beta. If we later charge for premium features, these stay true:
- Only a grown-up can buy anything. In the apps a child never sees a price and has no way to pay. The free website may show our own notes about our apps, free or paid, written for grown-ups.
- Before any payment is taken, this pack, the privacy notice and the terms will be updated to name the payment company and say what it handles.
- What we record about a purchase is which features a grown-up has bought, so we can open them. Nothing changes about what we hold on a child.
Schools
This page describes the app as it is today: a service for families. We do not hold data on a school's behalf, so there is no data processing agreement to sign. If we ever offer accounts that a school sets up for its pupils, we will put the right agreement and notices in place before any pupil is added.
Teacher tools, and any other BrightWren apps, will each have their own data protection pack before they launch. If one ever holds pupil data, such as names or class lists, it will be described there, with the agreement a school would need.
The free practice pages need no agreement at all, because they hold nothing about a child. Questions: privacy@brightwren.co.uk. App: app.brightwren.co.uk.