Trust centre

The answers, on one page.

Written for whoever has to sign off on it — a principal, a business manager, a parent who reads the fine print. If something below is not done yet, it says so.

The short answer

With no account, nothing about a child leaves their device — not their name, not their age, not the stories, not the reading log. The books are written on the phone, not on a server, which is also why the app works with no internet at all, and that is how the app ships.

An account is optional and belongs to an adult. You need one to read on a computer, to move to a new phone, or if a school provided access — and then a child’s first name, age, stage, interests, books and reading log are stored in a database in Sydney so they reach those devices. A surname, a birthday, a school or a photograph is refused by the server whether you have an account or not.

Data

With no account	Nothing. Everything about the child is on the device and there is nowhere for it to go.
With an account	An adult’s email address, a random device identifier, the plan, and — so they reach your other devices — the child’s first name, age as a single number, stage, interests, Cast, books and reading log.
What we never hold	A surname, a date of birth, a year level, a school, a photograph, a voice, a location. The server rejects a field that looks like any of them rather than storing it.
Where it lives	Australia — a PostgreSQL database in Sydney. The one exception is the sign-in email, which an adult’s address passes through in Tokyo; nothing about a child does.
Sub-processors	Neon (database, Sydney), Vercel (hosting), Resend and Amazon SES (the sign-in code), Apple (subscriptions). No analytics, no advertising, no chat.
How long	While the account is active, then deleted within 30 days of it closing.
Deleting it	One tap in the app clears the device immediately. Email us to close the account and we delete the server copy — children, books and reading log included — within 30 days.
Selling or sharing	Never. No advertisers, no data brokers, no third-party analytics.

How the stories are made

There is no AI model in the app and no story is generated on a server. Every story shape was written by a person. The phone fills one in with the child’s own world, then checks every single word against the sounds that child has been taught — and bins the whole story and starts again if one word does not pass.

Nothing learns from your child, because there is nothing here that learns. No child’s data is used to train anything, by us or anyone else.

Every book carries its own report: what share of it is inside the child’s sound set, which sounds it practises and how many times each, the tricky words used, and any names allowed early. It is on the back cover of the printed book and exports as a spreadsheet, one row per book.

Children

No ads, ever. There is no advertising SDK in the app.
No chat, no comments, no shared feed, no public gallery. Nobody can contact a child through it.
No child login. Accounts belong to adults; children do not have one.
First name only. No surname, no birthday — an age is a single number.
No streaks, scores, timers or leaderboards on any screen a child sees.
Rated 4+. Designed against the Australian Children’s Online Privacy Code.

Accessibility

Built to WCAG 2.2 AA, with the reading page held to AAA contrast. Two dyslexia faces ship with the app, alongside letter spacing, text size, a reading ruler and narration speed. Every control has a screen-reader label, every looping animation stops when Reduce Motion is on, and nothing anywhere depends on colour alone.

Not done yet: an independent third-party audit. It is booked work, not finished work, and we would rather say so.

For schools

What a Victorian government school needs before it can buy anything, and where we are on each.

Safer Technologies 4 Schools	Assessment in progress. We will publish the outcome here either way.
Privacy Impact Assessment	Under way with external advice, to be published on this page.
Australian hosting	Yes. Subprocessor list published here.
Data export	CSV of every book and every sound, per child or per class, on day one.
Curriculum alignment	Charts against Australian Curriculum v9, Victorian Curriculum 2.0 and NSW English K–2. Aligned to, never endorsed by.
Breach response	Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. Runbook in place, contact below.

Ask us anything

A person answers these, usually the same day: hello@theschoolofplay.co.

The full policy is on the privacy page, and the plain-English version is on safety and privacy.