Safeguarding

Contact

There is no child-to-child contact of any kind

The safest way to protect a child from contact risk is to build a product that has no way for one child to reach another. That is what we did.

• Children cannot message, friend, find, or see another child.
• There is no chat, no comments, no forum and no public profile to browse.
• There is no user search. A child cannot look another child up, because nothing in the app accepts another user as a search term.
• Nothing your child writes is ever shown to another child. The only free text a child can send is a report about a question they think is wrong — and that goes to our team, nobody else.

The only messages that exist in TransferNI travel between your household and us: you can send a support message, and we can send you service notices and announcements. There is no route from one household to another.

Accounts

One account per household, held by an adult

Your child does not have their own account, their own login, or an email address with us. There is a single account per household, created by an adult aged 18 or over who is the parent or legal guardian of the child using it.

This is a safeguarding decision before it is a product one. A child with no credentials of their own cannot be contacted through them, cannot be locked out of them, and cannot take them somewhere you do not know about. A child is identifiable to us only through the adult's account.

The adult's email address is verified before the account can be used, so an account cannot be created against an address nobody controls.

Data

The data we deliberately do not collect

We follow the data minimisation principle of the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code — the Children's Code — which means not collecting something simply because it might be useful one day.

We do not ask for, and have nowhere to store:

• a child's date of birth;
• their school;
• a home address or postcode;
• a photograph — avatars are illustrations, chosen from a fixed set we provide;
• a phone number or any other contact detail for the child;
• a full legal name. We ask for a first name or a nickname, and plenty of families use only a nickname.

What we hold about a child is the display name you chose and what they have practised — which quizzes they took, which questions they answered, and how they did. That is what the progress reports are built from, and it is the whole of it.

Everything is hosted in the United Kingdom, in Google Cloud's London region.

Advertising

No advertising, and no tracking of children

There is no advertising anywhere in TransferNI. There is also no third-party advertising or analytics software built into the app or into this website — no ad networks, no social media pixels, no session recording, no behavioural profiling.

This one is worth stating plainly, because "free" children's apps usually are not. A child using TransferNI is not the product, is not profiled, and is not being sold to anybody. We are paid by parents, which is the only business model that lets us say that.

Parent control

The features that could matter start switched off

Where the Children's Code asks for a safe default, we set the safe default rather than asking a child to find a setting.

• The leaderboard is off until a parent turns it on. Even when it is on, a child sees only their own percentile band — "Top 20%", "On track" — and never another child's name, score, rank or existence. There is no ranked list of children in TransferNI, and the app is never sent one.
• Encouragement messages are off until a parent allows them.
• A parent PIN protects parent-only actions — setting practice targets and assigning work. The PIN locks for 15 minutes after five wrong attempts, so it cannot be guessed by a determined child with an afternoon to spare.

You can close the account yourself at any time from the app. Doing so removes the profile and every identifier we hold, and the email address, password, PIN, display name and messages go with it.

Sharing

Nobody sees your child's progress unless you approve them

A teacher, tutor, or a second parent can follow a child's progress — but only ever because a parent asked for it and approved that specific person.

• You approve each person individually. A request that is waiting, declined, or withdrawn grants exactly nothing.
• You can revoke access instantly, from the Parent Area, without explaining yourself to anyone.
• Access is read-only. A supervisor cannot change your child's account, set work, or alter anything at all.
• They see your child's display name, the account email address, and practice results. They cannot see your payment or subscription details, your messages to us, or anything else about the household.
• Every invitation, approval, refusal and withdrawal is recorded in an append-only log, so the question "who was given access to this child's data, and when?" always has an answer.

A supervisor who has been declined cannot tell that they were declined rather than simply never approved — the app gives them the same answer either way. That is deliberate: a family's decision not to share is nobody else's information.

Content

Every question is written by us

There is no user-generated content in TransferNI. Every question, passage, answer and explanation your child sees was written or reviewed by our team before it reached them. No child can add content, and no child can see content another child has written.

If your child does meet a question that looks wrong, they can report it in one tap. It reaches our team, we check it, and we either fix the question or record that it was checked and is correct.

Raising a concern

If something in TransferNI is wrong, tell us

If you see anything in the app that worries you — a question that is not age-appropriate, something that does not match what this page says, or anything else at all — email support@transferni.com and we will look at it. That is the right route for anything to do with TransferNI, and we would genuinely rather hear it than not.

Worried about a child

If you are worried about a child's safety

This part is not about TransferNI. We are a practice tool — not a school, not a child protection service. We have no contact with your child outside the app and no safeguarding role in their life, so a worry about a child's actual safety should never wait on our support inbox. These are the people who deal with it:

• If a child is in immediate danger — PSNI, 999.
• To report child abuse when it is not an emergency — PSNI, 101, which puts you through to a specially trained officer. You can also report online, at any hour.
• For advice, or to share a concern anonymously — the NSPCC helpline, 0808 800 5000, or help@nspcc.org.uk.
• In Northern Ireland, concerns can also be raised with your local Health and Social Care Trust Gateway Team. The current numbers for all five Trusts, and the out-of-hours emergency line, are listed on Family Support NI.

You do not need to be certain to make contact. Reporting a worry is not an accusation, and it is always better raised than left.