For schools and parents Last checked 6 October 2026

Safeguarding statement

How BrightWren is built to keep children safe: nobody can contact a child, nothing identifies them, no third-party adverts, and what a child can type.

Not Another Studio Ltd

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0: ways for anyone to message a child
0: third-party adverts
1: free-text box on a child's practice screens, and it asks for no names
18+: the grown-up who holds every account

This is for a school's safeguarding lead, or a parent, who wants to know what a child can and cannot do in BrightWren. It describes how the product is built. It covers the free practice on the website and the BrightWren Plus app, for children aged 7 to 11 in Years 3 to 6.

What a child does

A child practises maths in a few different ways, follows an adventure map, builds a cartoon character called a Starling from a fixed list of parts, and wins trophies. Hats and paint for the Starling are won with in-game asteroids that practising earns. They are never bought with money.

Contact: nobody can reach a child

No chat and no messaging. There is no way for a child to write to anyone, or for anyone to write to a child.
No way for children to see or contact each other. No friends list, no public profiles and no leaderboards.
No way for us to contact a child. The only address we hold is a grown-up's.
No third-party adverts. The app has no third-party trackers. In the app a child never sees a price and can never pay for anything: anything paid is bought by a grown-up, in the grown-up's own area. Today nothing can take a payment.

Identity: nothing that says who a child is

The app never asks for a child's real name, birthday, school, address, photograph, email address, phone number or location, and there is nowhere to enter them. A child has no login of their own: they practise inside a grown-up's account, under a nickname the grown-up chose. The nickname box is limited to 24 characters, and our terms ask grown-ups not to use a real name.

What a child can type

A child answers maths questions. Where an answer is typed, it is a number or a short answer to the question on screen.

The only free-text box on a child's practice screens is the "something wrong with this question?" button, which has an optional note of up to 1,000 characters. (The nickname boxes are on the grown-up's own screens.) Under the box it says: don't write anyone's name, not even yours. The report records the question and the note, and no account reference, so it cannot be tied to a child. Reports go to us, and only to us. They are never shown to another child or another family.

Who can see a child's work

The grown-up whose account it is, and us, because we run the service and have to be able to fix it. Not other children, not other families, and not a school. It is locked to the account inside the database itself, so it does not depend on the app behaving.

Supervision, and who holds the account

The account belongs to a grown-up of 18 or over, who is responsible for the children on it. They sign in with a code sent to their email, and they can see each child's progress, and can remove a child, or close the account, at any time. Removing a child deletes their record.

Pressure and time

There is no streak to lose, and no penalty for a missed day.
A feature that is not open yet shows a padlock and a note to ask a grown-up. It never shows a price, so a child is never the one being sold to.
Clocks appear only where the real test has one: the Year 4 tables check (six seconds a question) and the Year 6 SATs mock (30 minutes). Practice mode has none for the SATs paper and never cuts the tables practice off.

Notes about our paid apps

The free practice on the website is free and always will be. As well as the practice itself, the website may carry our own notes about the paid BrightWren apps. These are written for grown-ups. They are never adverts from another company, and nothing on the free website can take a payment.

Safeguarding contact

If you are worried about a child's safety in connection with BrightWren, email safeguarding@brightwren.co.uk. It goes to our safeguarding lead, the founder of BrightWren. We read it ourselves and reply as soon as we can.

A report sent from the app does not say who wrote it. If one ever suggests a child may be at risk, we keep a record, take advice from the NSPCC, and call the police if a child may be in immediate danger.