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Last updated 23 September 2026
These terms cover Cookie Tutoring at tutoring.cookie.education: booking lessons, teaching them, and everything either side does on the platform. The cookie study app at cookie.education has its own terms, and both apply if you use both.
These terms are between you and Tristan Pagden, trading as cookie and Cookie Tutoring, in the United Kingdom (“we”, “us”). Our contact details are on the contact page.
By creating an account, booking a lesson, or listing yourself as a tutor, you agree to these terms. From 13 you can create your own account without a parent or guardian. Under 13, a parent or guardian creates the account for you; under 16, a parent, guardian or sponsor aged 18 or over books and pays for your lessons; see Students under 18 below.
No tutor appears in our tutor directory until we have verified them. Verification means, at a minimum: a confirmed university email address, a CV, degree and school grades, an interview held inside this platform, and a criminal record check on file that we have checked. We will not list a tutor whose check is outstanding, and the software enforces that rather than relying on anyone remembering it.
For a tutor in the UK that check is an Enhanced DBS certificate and nothing else is accepted. A tutor based outside the UK provides their own country's equivalent: the check issued for working with children where one exists, and its national police clearance where one does not, which a person reviews case by case. We do not describe any of those as a DBS. A check of any kind is treated as current for 12 months and we ask for a fresh one after that, the same period wherever it was issued, because we are not registered with the UK's subscription service and will not imply that a certificate stays live when it does not.
We may remove a tutor from the directory at any time, including while we look into a report. Being removed from the directory does not cancel lessons already booked unless we say so separately.
A criminal record check is a point-in-time record. It is not a guarantee about anyone's future conduct, which is why the safeguarding measures on this platform do not stop at vetting.
You and your tutor agree a time first, in your messages on Cookie Tutoring; either of you can suggest one, and nothing is booked or paid until you have both agreed. Lessons are then prepaid: you pay us rather than the tutor, and we hold the money until after the lesson. That is what lets us refund you under the policy below, and it makes us the merchant of record for the transaction.
This is the policy, and it is exactly what the software does. It applies alongside your legal right to cancel (above), which takes priority within 14 days of booking: inside that period a lesson that has not yet happened is always refunded in full on request.
Turning up is measured by who actually joins the lesson room, and there is a 15-minute grace period either way:
Refunds go back to the card you paid with. If a promotional credit was applied to the booking, the credit is returned to your account rather than paid out as cash.
If something went wrong in a lesson that this policy does not cover, email us at support@cookie.education. We would rather sort it out than stand behind a rule.
These rules apply to everyone, tutors and students alike. You agree to them when you finish onboarding, and they are the same words you were shown then:
Beyond those, we do not allow harassment, discriminatory or sexual content, impersonating anyone, attempting to access another person's account or data, or anything illegal.
Breaking these rules can mean losing access to the platform. For a tutor it can also mean removal from the directory and, where money is involved, withheld earnings for the lessons concerned.
Some things are never allowed on Cookie Tutoring, whether in a message, on a profile, in a review, in a lesson report, on the whiteboard, or said out loud in a lesson:
Most students here are under 18, and we treat all of this as applying to every lesson as if a child were in it. If you see any of it, report it; the section below says how.
We are a small service and we do not pretend to be more than that. Here is what actually stands between you and something harmful:
We use one piece of automatic checking, and this is exactly what it does.
Every message sent between a student and a tutor is checked by software for three things: something shaped like a phone number, an email address that is not ours, and the names of other messaging apps or phrases like “text me” or “add me on”. If it finds one, it files a report for a person to read. That is all it does:
It is a list of words and patterns, not an AI, and it does not look at video, the whiteboard, or anything you upload in a lesson. If you think it has been used in a way these terms do not describe, tell us and we will explain what we will do about it; if you think that is a breach of this agreement, you keep the right to take it further.
There is a Report control on every tutor profile, every review, every message and every lesson, and one inside the lesson room. Use whichever is nearest; it takes a few seconds, you pick a category, and you can add as much or as little as you like. You can also use Tell us about a problem, which works without an account and without knowing what to attach it to, or email safeguarding@cookie.education for anything about a child, or support@cookie.education for anything else.
The person you report is never told who reported them. Reporting something that turns out to be nothing is always the right call.
Keeping lessons here is partly about our commission, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It is also the only way the protections on this page exist at all: a lesson booked privately has no prepayment, no refund policy, no recorded conversation, no reporting route, and no record that anyone was ever DBS-checked.
So: do not arrange or pay for lessons with someone you met here outside the platform, and do not ask anyone to. That includes exchanging phone numbers, personal email addresses or social media handles for the purpose, whether in a message, on a profile, or out loud in a lesson.
If anyone asks you to move off the platform, tell us. That is a condition of using Cookie Tutoring rather than a favour: a single request is usually innocent and a pattern of them is not, and only we can see the pattern. How to report it. Nobody is ever penalised for reporting something that turned out to be nothing, and what happens next is published.
Messages between a student and a tutor are kept, and may be read by us if there is a safeguarding concern, a report, or a dispute about a lesson. You cannot edit or delete a message after sending it, because a record you can rewrite would be no protection to anybody.
We can hide a message if it breaks these terms, which means it stops being shown to the person it was sent to. We do not delete it: it stays in our records so that an appeal, a safeguarding enquiry or a lawful request can still be answered, and it can be put back if we got it wrong.
This is the single most important reason to keep conversations on the platform. See Privacy for how long we keep them and who can see them.
After a completed lesson, a student may review their tutor. Those reviews are public on the tutor's profile, shown under a shortened name, or with no name if the student prefers. An anonymous review is still tied to the lesson and counts like any other. A tutor may also record a private note about a student; those are never published.
A tutor's star rating and review count are calculated by us from real lessons and real reviews, and so are their hours tutoring, with the one addition below. Tutors cannot type in or edit any of them.
Occasionally, case by case, we add to a tutor's profile what we have confirmed about their tutoring before they joined us: reviews from students they taught, with the star rating that student gave and only with the student's agreement, and the hours they tutored. Each of those reviews is marked “before Cookie Tutoring” and does not count towards the star rating or review count. Hours tutored before joining are included in the hours shown.
Our reviews policy. Only somebody who took part in a lesson, including a free introduction or a lesson the tutor did not turn up to, can review it, once. You can edit a review for 48 hours after posting it, and a review that was edited says so. Nobody is ever rewarded for leaving a review, and a reward is never conditional on one. We remove a review only if it is not based on a genuine lesson, was paid for, is abusive or is about something other than the lesson, and when we do the tutor's rating and count are recalculated. We never remove a review for being unflattering, and a tutor cannot have one removed by asking. If a review looks wrong to you, there is a Report control on it; if we remove or refuse to remove one and you disagree, the same route applies as for anything else. Nobody who works for us reviews a tutor.
If you teach here, these apply to you as well as everything else on this page. You are self-employed and responsible for your own tax. You must be 18 or over. From 1 October 2026, if you teach any lesson while you are in the UK you must show us your right to work in the UK before you can be booked, because the law treats a matching service like this one as your employer for that purpose alone; it is where you are during the lesson that counts, not your nationality or where you live. You must hold an Enhanced DBS certificate with a children's barred-list check, or your own country's equivalent, and obtain a fresh one every 12 months; we are not registered to check the DBS Update Service, so a subscription to it does not replace that. We email you before the date; if a fresh certificate has not been recorded by then, your profile comes off the public list and new bookings pause until it is. Lessons already booked are not affected, and it is not a suspension. We do not ask for references for private tutoring; we will need two before you can be matched with a school.
What you learn about a student is confidential. Do not copy, download or store a student's work, messages or learning profile anywhere outside the platform, do not record or transcribe a lesson yourself or with any tool of your own, and never suggest meeting in person. How you teach is your own professional judgement; the rules we set are about conduct and safeguarding, not method.
We pay you as set out above. If a lesson you have already been paid for is refunded or the payment is reversed by the card issuer, we may reverse the corresponding transfer or take it from your next payout, and we tell you when we do. If we suspend or remove your listing we tell you the grounds in writing, and you can disagree through the route published below. Tutors are ordered on the site by whether they are accepting students, their rating, and how recently and quickly they respond; there is no paid placement. We give tutors 15 days' notice of a change to these terms unless the law requires a change sooner.
Under 13. A child under 13 cannot set up an account here, and nothing on this site asks them to agree to anything. They can have an account only when a parent or guardian creates one for them: the adult confirms they hold parental responsibility for that child, agrees to these terms on their behalf, and sets the password themselves. We record who did that and when. The adult can change that password or close the account at any time, and no account email is ever sent to the child. The child always signs in with the email address and password the adult set: signing in with Google can't be used on an account set up this way, because nobody has confirmed that address with us, and we won't let a Google account be joined to it later.
13 to 15. You can create and hold your own account without a parent or guardian. A parent, guardian or sponsor must be responsible for your lessons: they book, they pay, and they can read your messages with your tutor. If nobody is set up yet you can invite them from the site.
16 and 17. You can hold your own account and message tutors, agree a time and pay for your own lessons, without a parent or guardian. If you would rather a parent, guardian or sponsor looked after your lessons, they can add you from their own account instead. You are still under 18, so every protection on this page for younger students still applies to you. If you arrange your own lessons, no parent or guardian reads your conversations, and your tutor is told that.
Parents, guardians and sponsors must be 18 or over, and hold their own kind of account. Whoever books and pays for somebody else's lessons is the person we contract with, so we do not accept anyone under 18 in that role. It is chosen when the account is created and is separate from a student's account: a parent, guardian or sponsor account only ever books lessons for the people it looks after, and a student account cannot book for anybody else.
Many students here are under 18. If a parent, guardian or sponsor looks after your lessons:
We ask your age group once, when you sign up, and it decides who books your lessons. We never ask your date of birth. Please answer it honestly: it is a safeguarding question, not a formality.
If you refer someone to Cookie Tutoring and they complete their first paid lesson, we reward you. What you get depends on whether you are a student or a tutor with us:
Cookie Tutoring and cookie are the same business. When you recommend us, please be open about that rather than presenting it as an independent recommendation.
What you write, draw and upload stays yours. You give us permission to store it and show it to the people it is meant for: your tutor or your student, and us where a report or a safeguarding concern requires it. A tutor's public profile content (their photo, bio and video introduction) is, by its nature, published to anyone who visits their page.
Separately and narrowly: when you correct something our AI produced (challenging a mark, moving a question to a better topic, telling us a category is wrong), you grant us a licence to keep that correction, and the AI output it corrects, and to use them to improve our AI. That licence covers the correction itself and nothing else. Your uploaded source material is expressly outside it.
Nothing that happens in a lesson is covered by that: not the whiteboard, not your messages, not a recording or transcript if we ever add them. The setting for this lives in your account on cookie.education, because it is one account across both products. What is and is not kept is set out in our Privacy Policy.
Your tutor keeps a short note about what you are working towards and how you learn, so they can plan lessons. It holds learning information only. You and whoever looks after your lessons can read it at any time, and either of you can turn it off, which deletes what every tutor has written rather than hiding it. If they turn it off and you did not, we tell you.
Our AI suggests changes to it after a lesson, from the report your tutor has just written. Your tutor decides whether to use each suggestion, change it first, or throw it away; nothing an AI writes about you reaches you or your family until a person has agreed with it. What is in the note, who can read it and how long it is kept are set out in our Privacy Policy.
We provide the platform and the introduction. We do not guarantee any particular grade, result or outcome from tutoring, and nothing on this site should be read as a promise of one. Tutors are independent, and the teaching itself is theirs.
The service is provided as-is. Live video depends on your own connection and on services we do not control.
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, for a breach of the rights the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Beyond that, our liability to you for any claim connected to the platform is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and never to less than the price you paid for the lesson or lessons the claim is about. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
Most reports are a misunderstanding or somebody not knowing a rule existed, and are settled by us asking. Where they are not, this is the range of what can happen, in order, and with one deliberate exception at the end.
We aim to respond to a report about a child's safety the same day, and to anything else within 5 working days. Those are numbers we can actually hit rather than the shortest ones we could write down, because a promise we miss is worse than a longer one we keep.
This applies to any decision we make, including: something of yours we took down or hid; a warning, suspension or removal after a report; a report of yours we did not act on; the software above being used in a way these terms do not describe; and a complaint that we are not doing what the Online Safety Act requires of us.
If we reverse a decision, we undo what we did as far as we can: a listing goes back up, a hidden review, message or document is restored, and money is returned rather than credited.
We do not belong to an alternative dispute resolution scheme. If you are unhappy with our final answer you can go to the courts. The contact page says who we are and how to reach us, and how to tell us about content that should not be here.
We may update these terms where the law changes, where the platform changes, or to fix something that was unclear. The date at the top always says when. If a change materially affects what you have already paid for or how you use the platform, we will tell you by email before it takes effect rather than relying on you noticing, and you can close your account if you do not agree. Tutors get 15 days' notice of any change.
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. You can bring a claim in the courts of England and Wales; if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you can also bring one in your own courts.
Email support@cookie.education. For anything about a child's safety, read Safeguarding first; it says what to do and how quickly.