Privacy

What we collect

• Account details — full name, work email address, school or class name, the School Groups you belong to and your role in each.
• Sign-in data — your password is stored only as a secure hash by our authentication provider; we never see it.
• Project content — monthly readings, story blogs and any media files you upload, together with the school and account that contributed them.
• Activity records — an audit log of significant actions such as invitations, role changes, and content or account deletions, with a timestamp and the account responsible.

What we ask you not to upload

EarthTogether is not a place for pupil personal data. Please do not enter pupil names, photographs in which individual children are identified by name, contact details, dates of birth, or any special category data. Contribute at class or school level instead and avoid naming any individual pupil, member of staff or other identifiable person in stories, captions or filenames. If something is uploaded in error, tell your School Group Admin so it can be removed.

Pupils must never add content unsupervised. All uploads are made by signed-in adult staff using their own personal accounts, and the adult who uploads material is responsible for making sure it is appropriate and that the school has the necessary consents and permissions.

Why we hold it

Account details exist so that we can give the right people access to the right School Groups. Project content exists so partner schools can share and view their work. Activity records exist to keep the platform safe and accountable and to help resolve mistakes.

Who can see it

• Project content is visible only to signed-in members of the contributing School Group.
• School Group Admins can see the members and activity of their own School Groups.
• EarthLearn Super Admins can see all groups, content and activity records.
• Nothing on the platform is publicly viewable, indexed by search engines, sold, or used for advertising.

Media files

Uploaded photos, audio, film and PDFs are held in private storage. They are never given a public web address: signed-in members receive a short-lived signed link to view or play them. Each file is limited to 20 MB and each School Group to 1 GB in total.

How long it is kept

Project content is retained for the life of the project so that a school's contribution survives staff changes. If a member of staff leaves, their access is withdrawn but their content remains credited to their school. An EarthLearn Super Admin can permanently delete an account and its content within a School Group; that removal is immediate and irreversible, including the underlying media files.

Service providers

EarthTogether runs on hosted cloud infrastructure that provides the database, authentication and file storage used by the platform. These providers process data on our instructions in order to run the service.

Cookies and similar technologies

EarthTogether uses only strictly necessary cookies and browser storage. These keep you signed in during a session, protect the sign-in process and apply the automatic idle sign-out. They are essential for the platform to work, so no consent banner is required and they cannot be turned off while you use the service.

We do not use advertising, profiling or third-party analytics cookies, and we do not track you across other websites. If that ever changes, we will ask for your consent first and give you a way to accept or reject non-essential cookies. Clearing your browser storage will simply sign you out.

Your choices

You can view and update your own name and school details from My account, and change your password at any time. To correct or delete other information, or to ask what is held about you, contact your School Group Admin or the EarthLearn team at enquiries@theearthmuseum.co.uk. Each participating school remains responsible for its own pupil records; those records should never be placed on this platform.

Accounts are personal. Do not share your sign-in details with anyone else, and do not let pupils or colleagues use your account to add or edit content.