What we hold, and what we do not

Children

We ask for nothing about any child. There is no pupil record, no roll, no upload from your management information system, and no field in the product that asks for a child’s name or anything about a child. A member of your staff sending a parent a link may add that parent’s first name and a short line of their own, both optional; both appear on the page being sent, which has a public web address, and the field says so. Staff are told plainly to write nothing about the child, and we would ask you to say the same when you brief them.

Parents

A parent who opens something a member of your staff has sent does not create an account with us; the only details we hold are the optional first name and line your staff member added to the link. A parent who chooses to subscribe individually gives us an email address and their payment is handled by a regulated payments provider; we never see or store bank or card details.

We count how many times each link is opened, and how many subscriptions follow from it, as numbers against the link. We do not record who opened a link, and we do not record which parent subscribed after which link, so no parent’s subscription is tied to the member of staff who sent it.

Staff

A member of school staff using the teachers’ shelf gives us a school email address and, optionally, their own name and the school’s name. We keep a record of the links they have made, and how many times each has been opened, so they can send the same one again. Sign-in is by emailed link rather than a password.

Analytics

Our site analytics are cookieless and do not set tracking identifiers. We see aggregate page views and country-level location. We do not build profiles of readers, and we do not sell or share data with advertisers. There is no advertising in the chapters. On the book shelves, the links to buy a book from Bookshop.org are affiliate links, marked as such on each one: they earn the library a small commission, and we pass nothing about a reader to anyone. A page you send a parent carries none.

The four questions your data protection lead will ask

These are the questions that come back when this page is forwarded, and the answers, in one place. The fuller account is in the privacy policy, which now carries a section on school staff.

• Who is the controller, and are you registered?Kensington Square Therapy Ltd, company 16707111, ICO registration ZC022097. The data protection lead is the company’s sole director, reachable at hello@theparentbook.com. There is no Data Protection Officer, and one is not required.
• How long do you keep it?A member of staff’s account, and the record of the links they have made, are deleted automatically after 24 months with no sign-in, and sooner on request. Sign-in email logs are kept for 12 months. IP addresses in server logs are kept for 30 days.
• Who else touches it?Cloudflare, for hosting and for storage on its global network, which we have not restricted to the UK or the EU, and Resend, for email delivery in the EU region. Nobody else: no advertising network, no third-party analytics platform, and no other school.
• What is your lawful basis?Legitimate interests, for providing a free professional tool that a member of your staff has asked for, and keeping the minimum record that makes it work. The half-term note is sent on consent: it goes only to a member of staff who asks for it on the shelf, and every one carries a one-click stop.

Any member of your staff can ask us to delete their account and everything on it, and we will do it the same day. So can you, on their behalf.

Safeguarding

The library is not a reporting route and is not a place to record a concern. It carries no messaging, no comments and no way for a parent or a child to contact a therapist through it. Every page that touches a clinical edge carries the same crisis signposting, in the same order, from a single canonical source, so a parent who arrives at the wrong page at the wrong moment still finds the right number.

Where a page names an organisation, it names what that organisation does and when it is the right call, because a list of helplines with no guide to choosing between them is not signposting.

Clinical governance

Everything is written by therapists registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS), and is editorially reviewed before publication. The library is not therapy and does not hold itself out as therapy. It says so on every page.

The policies in full

Our privacy notice and terms are published, and we are glad to answer anything a data protection lead wants to put to us in writing.