Terms and Conditions of Use

1. Who may use EarthTogether

Accounts are for adult members of staff at participating schools and for EarthLearn team members. There is no public sign-up: every account is created by invitation from an EarthLearn Super Admin or a School Group Admin. Accounts must not be created for, or used by, pupils.

2. Accounts and sign-in

• Sign-in uses your work email address and a password you set yourself.
• Accounts are personal and must not be shared. Do not give your password to anyone else, do not stay signed in on a device pupils use, and do not let pupils or other colleagues add content under your account.
• You are signed out automatically after a period of inactivity, and you should sign out at the end of each session, particularly on shared or classroom devices.
• Tell your School Group Admin or the EarthLearn team immediately if you think an account has been accessed by someone else.

3. Roles and permissions

• EarthLearn Super Admins create School Groups and projects, invite and remove members of any role, and may edit or remove any content on the platform.
• School Group Admins invite and remove School Users within their own School Group, and may edit or remove content contributed by members of that group.
• School Users add, edit and remove their own project content.

A School Group may hold up to 20 School Users. Roles are granted per School Group, and removing someone from one group does not affect their membership of another.

4. Project content and visibility

Project content — monthly data readings, story blogs and media files — is never published publicly. It is visible only to signed-in members of the School Group that contributed it, and to EarthLearn Super Admins. Do not copy content out of the platform and republish it elsewhere without the permission of the contributing school.

Write about classes, year groups or the school as a whole. Do not name individual pupils, staff or other identifiable people in stories, captions, filenames or media uploads.

5. Acceptable use

• Contribute only content created by your school for the project in question.
• Pupils must never add content unsupervised. All contributions must be uploaded by a signed-in adult member of staff using their own personal account.
• Do not upload pupil names, contact details, dates of birth or any other personal data about children. Refer to classes, year groups or the school as a whole instead.
• Do not upload anything unlawful, offensive, misleading, or that infringes someone else's rights, and do not upload material you do not have permission to share.
• Do not attempt to access other School Groups' content, probe the platform's security, or use automated tools to extract data.

6. Media uploads and storage

Photos, audio, film and PDF files may be attached to story blogs. Each individual file is limited to 20 MB, and each School Group has a total media allowance of 1 GB. You must confirm at the point of upload that you hold the consents your school requires for the material. Files are held in private storage and served only through short-lived signed links to signed-in members.

7. Copyright and permission

Your school keeps ownership of the content it contributes. By uploading, you grant EarthLearn permission to store and display that content within the platform for the purposes of the project. Content stays credited to the contributing school even if the member of staff who added it later leaves the platform.

You must have permission to share every image, audio clip, film and document you upload. This includes your school's own media consents for photographs and recordings of children, and any third-party material that is not your own. EarthLearn is not responsible for checking copyright or consent; that responsibility lies with the contributing school and the School User who uploads the material.

8. Activities, risk assessment and data collection

Many projects ask schools to carry out real-world activities — such as air quality monitoring, biodiversity surveys or outdoor investigations — to generate data. The decision to carry out these activities, and the risk assessment for them, sits with the School User and School Group Admin who organise them, not with EarthLearn. Schools must follow their own policies, supervision arrangements and health and safety procedures.

EarthLearn provides project templates and a place to record results; it does not supervise pupils or endorse any particular method of data collection.

9. Removing accounts and content

Access can be withdrawn at any time by a School Group Admin (within their group) or by an EarthLearn Super Admin. Super Admins can also permanently delete an account and its content within a School Group; permanent deletion cannot be undone.

10. Availability and changes

EarthTogether is provided for educational use and may be updated, interrupted for maintenance or changed as projects develop. We may update these terms; material changes will be notified to School Group Admins. Continued use after an update means you accept the revised terms.

11. Contact

Questions about these terms should go to your School Group Admin in the first instance, or to the EarthLearn team at enquiries@theearthmuseum.co.uk.