The Children’s Code, in plain English

The UK has a rule book for any online product that a person under 18 might use. The full name is the Age Appropriate Design Code. Most people call it the Children’s Code. It comes from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the same body that looks after how all our data is used. This is the short, plain-English version — written so a Year 6 reader can follow it, because the Code is partly about them.

Fifteen ideas, one promise

The Code has fifteen ideas in it. They all point at the same promise. A product used by under-18s should treat that person as a child first and a user second. That means quiet defaults, small amounts of data, no nudges that pull a child back when they wanted to log off, and a parent-friendly way to ask questions about what is going on.

The bits a tutoring app must get right

Three pieces matter most for a tutoring app.

• Data minimisation. A tutor needs a child’s name, year group and the subjects they are working on. A tutoring tool does not need their postcode, their school, their location, or anything that is not part of the lesson.
• Profiling off by default. No leaderboard. No streak. No public profile. No “recommended for you” loop. A child should not be sorted into a category by a system that learns from their behaviour unless a parent and the tutor have both said yes.
• A clear path to a real person. If a child or a parent has a question or a worry, the route to a named, real human should be short and obvious. Not a chatbot. Not a help-centre maze.

What it looks like in TutorStudio

In the student surface, motion is gentle and praise is private. There are no badges and no “keep your streak alive” nudges. The homework view does one thing — show the homework — and the messaging view does one thing — let the student ask the tutor a question.

In the tutor surface, every piece of information about a student is labelled with where it came from and who can see it. A safeguarding moment has a one-tap route to the designated safeguarding lead and a written log that cannot be edited after the fact.

The Code is not a tick-list. It is a way of building. The work pays for itself in calm lessons and parents who trust the tool.