Terms of service

These terms apply to everyone who uses the platform: the parents and guardians who book tuition, and the tutors who deliver it. Some sections apply to tutors only and are marked as such. By creating an account, booking a session or teaching through the platform, you agree to them. Please read them carefully.

1. Who we are and how to contact us

The platform at cts-edu.com is operated by Complete Tutor Solutions("CTS", "we", "us"). Complete Tutor Solutions is a trading name of Complete School Solutions Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16984053, whose registered office is at Unit 16, Roundhouse Court, Barnes Wallis Way, Chorley, PR7 7JN, United Kingdom.

You can contact us at info@cts-edu.com. If we need to contact you, we will use the email address on your account, so please keep it current.

2. Words we use

• The platform means the website at cts-edu.com, together with our messaging, booking and payment systems and the video rooms that sessions run in.
• A parent is the adult who holds the account and books sessions. A student is the child who receives the tuition.
• A tutor is a tutor whose profile has been cleared by us and is live on the platform.
• A session is one online, one to one lesson booked through the platform.
• Our service feeis what CTS charges for finding and vetting tutors and running the platform. It is already included in the hourly rate shown on a tutor's profile.

3. What CTS does, and who you contract with

CTS finds and vets tutors, lists them, and provides the platform on which sessions are requested, booked, paid for, delivered and recorded. We will provide that service with reasonable care and skill.

Your contract for the tuition is with CTS.We are not an introducer putting you in touch with someone else and stepping aside. We contract with you for the tuition, and we buy the tutor's time separately: tutors are employed for this work by an umbrella company (section 12.1), not by you and not by us. So the price on a tutor's profile is our price for our service, VAT is due on the whole of it, and one invoice covers the lot.

The teaching itself is delivered by the tutor. That is who is in the room, and who you should raise a teaching point with first. But if anything goes wrong, you come to us under section 8 rather than having to work out who to pursue. We investigate, we can refund you, and we can withhold the tutor's fee.

The hourly rate shown on a tutor's profile is the whole amount you pay for an hour of that tutor's time. It includes our service fee and the VAT on it. There is no joining fee, no subscription and no separate charge on top, and nothing is added at checkout.

We do not promise that the platform will be available without interruption. We will give notice of planned maintenance where we reasonably can. We also do not promise any particular academic result: tuition helps, but no one can guarantee a grade.

4. Accounts and eligibility

• Parent accounts may only be opened by someone aged 18 or over who holds parental responsibility for the student.
• Students are under 18 and use the service through their parent's account. Students do not hold their own accounts and do not contract with us or with a tutor.
• Tutor accounts may only be held by someone aged 18 or over who is entitled to work in the United Kingdom.
• We ask every account holder for a UK mobile number, and it has to be a mobile rather than a landline. We use it to reach you about your own sessions: a tutor being offered work, a family whose session is about to start or has had to be moved. It is not used for marketing, and it is not passed to the other side of a booking, so a family never gets a tutor's number and a tutor never gets a family's. Messages may be sent by text or by WhatsApp.
• You are responsible for keeping your login details secure and for activity on your account. Tell us at once if you think someone else has access to it.
• The information you give us must be accurate and kept up to date. We record which version of these terms was in force when you registered and each time you sign in.

5. Sessions

• Every session is online and one to one, delivered in our own video room in your browser. We do not arrange in-person tuition, and tuition arranged through CTS must not take place in person or on any other video or messaging service.
• A session runs in whole hours, from 1 hour upwards, for as long as the tutor has free, and may start at any 15 minute point within it. So a session can begin at 10:15 and run to 12:15, but not to 11:45.
• You are responsible for your own equipment and internet connection: a device with a working camera, microphone and browser. A session that cannot go ahead because of a problem at your end is treated as a cancellation under section 7.
• If a session cannot go ahead because of a fault on our side, you pay nothing and any payment already taken is refunded in full.

6. Booking and payment

• You request a session at a time the tutor has free. The booking is confirmed when the tutor accepts it.
• The rate shown when you book is the rate for that session, even if the tutor changes their rate afterwards.
• You book and pay for a length, not for time used. Sessions are booked in whole hours, from 1 hourup to as much of the tutor’s free time as you want, and the price is that length at the tutor’s hourly rate. If the session finishes early, whether because the work is done or because your child has had enough, the booked length is still charged: the tutor set that time aside and turned down other work for it. If you know you want a shorter session, book a shorter one.
• You add a payment card the first time you book. The card is held by our payment provider; we never see or store your full card number.
• Nothing is charged when you book. About 5 days before a session we place a hold on your saved card for the amount of that session. A hold reserves the amount. It does not take it.
• We take payment at midday, two days before the session. You can choose to pay earlier from your sessions page at any point within 14 days of the session.
• If the tutor declines, or does not respond before the session, the hold is released in full and no payment is taken.
• If a payment fails we will tell you by email, and by WhatsApp if you have asked us to use it.
• If a card is refused we will try it once more and no more than that, and we will not try it again at all where the bank has told us the refusal is final — a card reported lost or stolen, or a number that is not valid. Card scheme rules allow only the first attempt on a refusal of that kind, so trying again would be a breach as well as pointless.
• We will tell you when a card is refused, and again if we have stopped trying it. That second message matters more than the first: a card we have given up on leaves the session unpaid, and you would otherwise have no way of knowing.
• You can update your card at any time. When you do, we will try the new card straight away for any session that has not finished and that is already due a hold or a payment under the timings above, so a session you have fixed the card for does not stay unpaid. That includes a session already under way: if you fix the card during the lesson we take the whole session price, not a part of it, and the room opens for whatever time is left.
• A session that has not been paid for does not open its video room. The session is not cancelled and stays booked, and saving a working card puts the outstanding amount through and lets you straight in. Your tutor is told beforehand that the room will not open, so nobody is left waiting without knowing why.
• If the session comes and goes unpaid, the amount for it is still owed and we will still ask you for it. It is not recorded as a no-show, and nothing on the record treats it as your child having missed a lesson. Your tutor is paid for the hour they set aside whether or not your payment reached us, which is part of why the amount stays payable: the hour was really held for you and somebody was really paid for it.
• A session is not cancelled automatically because a payment failed. It stays in your diary and your tutor’s until somebody here decides otherwise. We may cancel confirmed sessions where payment has not been settled, rather than let the hour be held open and then paid for out of our own pocket.

7. Cancellations and refunds

• If you cancel a confirmed session at least 24 hours before its start time, you pay nothing. If payment has already been taken, because we take it two days before, we refund it in full.
• If you cancel with less than 24 hours' notice, we charge 50% of the session price and refund the rest. The tutor has held that time for you and turned down other work for it, so a share of that fee is paid on to them.
• If your child does not attend and you have not cancelled, we charge the full session price. That is 100% of it, with nothing refunded: the tutor was in the room, the whole hour was held for you, and they are paid for it in full, so there is nothing left to give back. Any notice at all brings the charge down to 50%, and 24hours' notice or more costs you nothing, so tell us rather than letting the time pass. This applies to a session the tutor was there to teach: if the session was not delivered for a reason on our side or the tutor's, section 8 applies instead and you are not charged for it.
• If the tutor cancels at any point, or we cancel, you pay nothing and any payment already taken is refunded in full. That includes a tutor blocking time off after your session was confirmed.
• Cancel on the platform, not by messaging the tutor. A session that is not cancelled on the platform stays confirmed and may still be charged.
• Refunds are returned to the card you paid with. Your bank decides how long that takes to appear.

Nothing in this section affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

8. If something goes wrong with a session

Tell us as soon as you can, and in any event within 14 days of the session. Email info@cts-edu.com or message us from your account.

That deadline does not apply to a concern about a child's safety. There is no time limit on raising a safeguarding concern with us, however long ago the session was and whether or not the account is still open. The 14 days above is about a session that did not happen, was cut short, was not as described, or was charged wrongly. If you are worried about a child, tell us whenever you realise, and see section 13.

We will look into what happened, which may include reviewing the session recording under section 9. Where a session was not delivered, or was cut short for a reason on the tutor's side, we will refund you in full or in part as appropriate. Where a complaint is about the teaching itself, we will investigate it and we can withhold or return the tutor's fee. Because your contract for the tuition is with us (section 3), you raise it with us and we put it right.

Feedback after a session is private. Both a family and a tutor can tell us how a session went, and what either of them writes is read by us and is not shown to the other. A tutor never sees what a family wrote about them and a family never sees what a tutor wrote about them. That is deliberate: feedback its subject can read is not feedback, and a parent who knows the tutor will read it writes something else.

The one exception is the star rating a family may leave on a tutor. Ratings are averaged and shown on that tutor's profile, because a family choosing a tutor is entitled to know what other families thought. The average is public; the words next to it are not.

9. Session recording

Every session is recorded, video and audio, for safeguarding review, for resolving disputes, and so that the parent who booked a session can watch their own child's lesson back. This is not optional and there is no unrecorded version of the service: recording is one of the protections the platform is built on, alongside vetting and monitoring. Both participants are shown a recording notice before each session.

By registering, parents consent to the recording of sessions their child takes part in. Tutors consent as part of joining the platform. Recordings are stored, used and deleted as described in our privacy notice, which also sets out how long we keep them and what rights you have over them.

Who can see a recording.Our safeguarding team, and the parent who booked the session, for their own child's sessions only. A parent opens a recording from their sessions page; the link is created at the moment of watching and stops working shortly afterwards, so it cannot be passed on. Tutors cannot view recordings of their own sessions, and no family can see another family's.

You must not make your own recording of a session, take screenshots of it, or store or share any part of it, and a parent who watches a recording must not share it or any part of it with anyone else. Tutors have no right to a copy. Your rights under data protection law are unaffected and are explained in the privacy notice.

9.1 Transcripts and automated checks

Recordings are also turned into a written transcript, and an automated system reads that transcript looking for two things: anything that suggests a child may be at risk, and personal contact details being exchanged or tuition being arranged off the platform, which section 10 does not allow.

The reason is honest and worth stating: nobody watches an hour of video on the off chance, so a recording on its own only helps once somebody has already noticed something. A transcript can be checked in a minute. That is the difference between a safeguard that exists and one that is used.

The automated check does not decide anything about anybody. It can only raise something for a member of our staff to look at. No account is suspended, no session is stopped and no report is made because of what an automated system concluded: a person reviews every flag and records what they decided. You will not be told a flag was raised, because most of them turn out to be nothing and telling somebody they were flagged before anyone has looked would be alarming and unfair. If a review finds something real, we contact you.

Transcripts are held to the same rule as recordings: our designated safeguarding staff, and nobody else. A tutor cannot read a transcript, including of their own lesson, and a family cannot read one either. Who we send the recording and the transcript to in order to produce them, how long we keep them and what rights you have over them are all in the privacy notice.

10. Contact stays on the platform

This is the rule that most often decides whether a child is protected or not, so it is set out in full.

10.1 What is not allowed

Where a family and a tutor have been introduced through CTS, neither may:

• share or ask for personal contact details, including phone numbers, personal email addresses, social media accounts or accounts on any other tutoring service;
• arrange, deliver or take part in tuition outside the platform, whether paid or unpaid;
• make or accept payment for tuition outside the platform; or
• invite, encourage or agree to any of the above, including through a third party such as another family member or another agency.

This applies in two distinct ways, and the difference matters:

• While you are on the platform, from the moment of introduction until your account is closed, it is a term of using the platform at all. It does not stop you tutoring anyone else, anywhere, on any terms.
• After your account closes, it continues in relation to families you were introduced to here, for 12 months from the last session between that family and that tutor, and no longer. It is a fixed period with an end date, not an indefinite one.

10.2 Why

Off-platform tuition is unvetted, unmonitored and unrecorded. The DBS check, the ongoing clearance monitoring, the recording and the route to raise a concern all stop at the edge of the platform. It also removes the payment protection in sections 6 and 7 from the family, and from the tutor it removes the collection arrangement in section 12.4: we take the money from the family, so a tutor teaching off the platform is chasing it themselves. Our safeguarding page explains the protections this rule preserves.

10.3 Tutors: the sum payable (T)

If a tutor breaks section 10.1 in relation to a family, the tutor agrees to pay CTS a sum of up to £5,000 for that family. A separate sum is payable for each family in relation to which the tutor breaks the rule.

The amount payable in any given case is the loss we have actually suffered, up to that ceiling. The sum is a genuine pre-estimate of that loss and is not a penalty. It reflects what it costs us to put a tutor in front of a family and to keep that arrangement safe, namely:

• recruiting and advertising for the tutor, and the staff time spent selecting them;
• vetting them: enhanced DBS check, identity and right-to-work verification, references and a safeguarding interview, and the continuing cost of monitoring that clearance;
• onboarding, profile approval and support;
• building and running the platform the introduction was made through, including the recording and safeguarding systems; and
• the service fees we would have earned on that family's future sessions, which are lost once the arrangement moves off the platform.

The sum is payable on written demand and is in addition to our right to suspend or close the account under section 15. It does not apply where a family and a tutor already had a genuine tutoring relationship before either joined CTS and can show it.

10.4 Families

Families must not ask a tutor for their personal contact details, nor invite or accept an arrangement outside the platform. A family who does so loses the protections described in section 10.2, and we may close the account under section 15. We do not charge families a fixed sum for this, but we reserve our right to recover losses we can show we have suffered.

11. Expected conduct

Everyone using the platform must:

• treat other users with courtesy and respect;
• use the platform only for arranging and delivering tuition for the registered student;
• not post or send anything defamatory, offensive, harassing, obscene or unlawful, and tell us if they receive something of that kind;
• not use the platform to advertise other services or to recruit for another business;
• not ask a tutor to complete coursework, controlled assessment or any other work that is submitted as the student's own, and tutors must refuse if asked;
• not behave in any way that puts a child at risk, and follow the expectations set out on our safeguarding page.

12. Tutors (T)

This section applies to tutors only, in addition to everything above.

12.1 Your status and how you are paid

Your agreement with CTS is for the use of this platform. Nothing in these terms creates a partnership between us.

You are employed by an umbrella company for the work you do through CTS. That company is Orbital Umbrella Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 07427816, whose registered office is at Digital Media Centre, County Way, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2JW. It operates PAYE on your pay, which means it deducts income tax and National Insurance before you receive it, and it is the umbrella company, not CTS, that gives you a payslip and a P60. We tell it what you are owed each month; it pays you.

You do not contract with the family for the tuition. CTS does, as section 3 explains, and buys your time through the umbrella company. You will see older tutoring platforms say the opposite, that the tutor contracts with the family and the platform merely introduces them. That is not this arrangement, and telling you it was while employing you through an umbrella for the same work would be two answers to one question. In practice it means the family's complaint, the family's refund and the family's unpaid card are ours, not yours.

You will have your own agreement with the umbrella company, separate from these terms, and you should read it. It is what sets out your employment rights, your holiday pay and any deductions it makes. CTS is not a party to it and cannot vary it.

You remain responsible for your own equipment and internet connection. Holding your own professional indemnity or public liability cover is not a condition of teaching on the platform. That is not the same as being covered by ours, and the difference is worth stating plainly rather than leaving you to assume: CTS holds insurance for its own business, it does not name tutors as insured under it, and you should not rely on it for the teaching you deliver. Whether to take out cover of your own is your decision.

What you do have is the umbrella company's employer's liability cover, because it employs you and that cover is compulsory for employers by law. That is a different thing again from insurance against a claim arising out of your teaching.

12.2 Vetting and clearance

• You cannot appear in search or take a booking until you are cleared. Clearance means an enhanced DBS check, identity and right-to-work verification, references and a safeguarding interview with our school staffing team.
• Your clearance record is held and maintained by CTS, and not by anybody else. Our sister staffing company, Complete Staffing Solutions, interviews tutors for us as part of clearance, and we hold the notes and the outcome. The record itself is ours and is held in one place only. It is not a copy of one CSS keeps: where both companies know a person, each holds its own record rather than one mirroring the other. Every change to it is recorded against the member of our staff who made it. If something in it is wrong, tell us at info@cts-edu.com and we will correct it here, because it is ours to correct.
• You must tell us immediately of anything that affects your clearance, including any conviction, caution, referral, investigation or safeguarding allegation, whether it arose before or after you joined.
• If your clearance lapses or is withdrawn, your profile is removed automatically and your pending sessions are cancelled and refunded. You cannot teach again until it is back in place and verified.

12.3 Your rate

You set your hourly rate when you join, and it applies to every session you teach. The rate a family sees on your profile is your rate plus our service fee, the employment costs described below, and the VAT due on them. You must not offer tuition to a family found through CTS at any rate outside the platform: see section 10.

What comes out of your rate, and what does not.This needs saying precisely, because "nothing is deducted" and "PAYE is deducted" are both things a tutor could be told and they are not the same sentence.

• CTS takes no cut of your rate.Our service fee is added on top of it, to the family's price. It is not taken out of it. There is no platform commission, no listing fee and no charge for being on the platform.
• Employer National Insurance, the apprenticeship levy, your holiday pay and the umbrella company's own fee are funded by CTS on top of your rate, not taken out of it. They are built into the family's price alongside our fee, and none of that money reaches us.
• PAYE is deducted, because you are employed. The umbrella company takes income tax and employee National Insurance out of your pay before you receive it, exactly as an employer does. So the amount that reaches your bank is less than your hourly rate multiplied by the hours you taught, and that is tax, not a cut taken by us.
• Your holiday pay is accrued and held by the umbrella company rather than rolled up into each payment, and it is paid to you when you ask for it. It builds up as you teach and stays with the umbrella company until you request it, so it does not arrive as part of your ordinary pay and you do have to ask. How you make that request, and whether the umbrella company makes any further deduction of its own, are set by your agreement with it, and the umbrella company will confirm both of those in your contract with it. Read that agreement. If anything in it contradicts this section, tell us, because one of the two is wrong.

Changing your rate. Your rate is fixed on your profile and you cannot edit it yourself. Ask us at info@cts-edu.com and we will change it. Sessions already booked keep the rate they were booked at, so a change applies to bookings made after it.

12.4 How you are paid

• You are paid monthly, at the end of the month, for the sessions you completed up to that month's cut-off on the 21st of the month. A session completed after the cut-off is paid at the end of the following month.
• We collect from the family, not you.We hold the family's card, place the hold and take the payment under section 6. You never invoice a family and never chase one. Where the family's payment does not reach us, that is ours to recover and not yours to lose, and it makes no difference whether the payment failed after the session went ahead or was never arranged in the first place. What the family owes does not stop being owed, and we go on collecting it; it stops being your problem rather than stopping being a debt.
• You are paid for a session the platform records as taught, on the cycle above, and whether or not the family's payment reached us. Every session runs in our own video room and is recorded, so whether a lesson happened is a matter of record rather than of anybody's word. Where the record shows the lesson ran and the payment then failed, collecting it is ours and the shortfall is not yours: that is a term of this agreement and you can hold us to it. It does not extend to tuition arranged off the platform, where we collect nothing and can protect nothing.
• A session the family never paid for is still paid to you. Where a payment has not been arranged we do not open the video room, so the lesson may not go ahead at all — but you kept that hour free and turned other work down for it, so the session is closed off as completed and goes on a payout run like any other. We record against the booking that the money never arrived and that the shortfall is ours, and what the family owes stays ours to collect. It is not recorded as a no-show, and nothing on your record treats a session the family did not pay for as an absence.
• If you say you taught it, we will look and a person will answer you. Tell us and we will check what the platform holds for that hour. Where it supports you, a member of our team marks the session as taught and it goes on a payout run; where there is nothing either way, a named person decides and tells you what they decided and why, and what you told us is kept on the booking under your name. We are not asking you to prove anything you cannot: if we cannot tell whether the lesson ran, that is not resolved against you as a matter of course.
• A session that is cancelled before it is taught is not paid for unless the late cancellation fee in section 7 is charged on it. That follows from being paid for the sessions you teach, and is worth saying on its own, because it is the case however much notice was given and whoever cancelled: a family cancelling more than 24 hours ahead pays nothing, so there is nothing to pay you out of. It does not touch what you have earned for any other session.
• Where a family cancels inside 24 hours and the late cancellation fee in section 7 is charged, you are paid a share of that fee on the same cycle. It is a share, not the whole session fee: the 50% charged to the family has the VAT taken off it first, then our platform fee for the hours that were booked, and what remains is your pay together with the employment costs that ride on it. On a short session at a lower rate that can come to nothing at all, and where it does, nothing is what you are paid. Ask us and we will show you the figure for any particular session.
• The umbrella company collects your bank details from you directly and makes the payment. CTS never holds your bank details and will never ask you for them.

12.5 Session length

You are paid for the length that was booked, at your hourly rate. A session that finishes early is still paid in full: the family booked that time and you kept it free. It follows that you should not book or agree a longer session than the work needs, and you must not stop early as a matter of routine.

12.6 Delivering sessions

• Accept or decline requests promptly, and be in the video room, ready to teach, at the start time.
• If the student does not appear, wait 10 minutes and then tell us through the platform rather than contacting the family another way. That is the point the session may be reported as a no-show. Whether a fee is charged for it is a separate decision we take on the booking, so reporting it is not the same as charging for it.
• A no-show on our records means one thing: that somebody did not appear. It used to mean two, because a session the family had not paid for was closed the same way. That is no longer how one is closed: an unpaid session is closed as completed and you are paid for it under section 12.4, so nothing on your record turns a payment problem into an absence. If you have a session on your record from before this version that was closed as a no-show for that reason, the bullet in section 12.4 about telling us applies to it.
• If you cannot teach a session, cancel it on the platform as early as you can. The family is not charged, and any payment already taken is refunded to them in full.
• All written contact with a family about a booking must go through the platform.

12.7 Signing these terms

Tutors accept these terms by giving a recorded digital signature during onboarding, before a profile can go live. We keep a record of that signature together with the version of these terms you signed and the date and time you signed it, so that it is always clear which wording you agreed to. Your agreement is confirmed again each time you sign in.

12.8 Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs we incur as a result of your breach of these terms, or arising out of the tuition you deliver. That includes claims arising from your conduct towards a family, a student or our staff; from a breach of the safeguarding obligations in section 14; from any arrangement you make with a family outside the platform, including anything covered by section 10; and from any other breach of section 10 or section 14. It does not apply to the extent the claim, loss or cost is caused by our own breach or negligence.

13. Content and intellectual property

You keep ownership of the material you upload, including profile text, photographs and teaching materials. You give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, copy, display and use that material for the purpose of operating and promoting the platform. The licence ends when the material is removed, except for copies we are required to keep for safeguarding, legal or accounting reasons.

You must not upload anything you do not have the right to upload, anything that infringes someone else's rights, anything harmful to our systems, or anything that breaches section 11. We may remove material, suspend an account and, where the law requires it or a child may be at risk, report the matter to the police, to local authority children's services or to another authority.

14. Safeguarding

• Parents should remain contactable and nearby while a session is running, and should know what their child is doing online. A tutor is not a substitute for supervision.
• Tutors must follow our safeguarding policy and all relevant law and guidance on working with children, and must report any concern to us immediately rather than dealing with it themselves.
• Anyone can raise a concern, however small it seems, by emailing info@cts-edu.com. It reaches our safeguarding team, and there is no time limit on raising one.

What happens after a concern is raised is set out on our safeguarding page.

15. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close an account if these terms are breached, for example by off-platform contact, abusive behaviour or misuse of the platform, or where we reasonably consider it necessary to protect a child or other users. Where a tutor's clearance lapses, their access is suspended automatically and pending sessions are cancelled and refunded. You can close your account at any time by contacting us; confirmed sessions at the point of closure are handled under section 7, and the post-closure part of section 10 continues to apply for the fixed period stated in section 10.1 and no longer.

16. Our liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. Your statutory rights as a consumer are not affected.

Subject to that, we are responsible for foreseeable loss or damage caused by our breach of these terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable when the contract was made, for loss caused by events outside our reasonable control, or for business losses. The platform is supplied to families for private, domestic use.

A tutor enters into these terms for purposes relating to their trade, business, craft or profession, rather than as a consumer.

For tutors, and subject to the first paragraph of this section, we are not liable, so far as the law allows, for any of the following: loss of profit, loss of business or lost earnings, including earnings lost because a family cancelled a session, booked fewer than expected, or left the platform; indirect or consequential loss; loss of an opportunity; or loss of goodwill or of reputation. Each of those is a separate provision, and if one of them is held to be unenforceable the others still stand.

We are also not liable for earnings you would have made during a period when the platform was unavailable, delayed or suspended. That is about work you did not get, and it does not touch anything else: it does not affect pay for sessions you have already taught, which section 12.4 governs, and it does not affect any liability of ours that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Our total liability to a tutor is limited to the greater of £250 and the total fees we paid you in the 12 months before the claim, up to a maximum of £5,000. So the more you have actually earned here, the more you can recover.

Those two figures are set for stated reasons rather than picked. The main measure is the fees we have actually paid you, because that is the recorded size of your business with us and it cannot be argued about. The £250 underneath it is roughly what a tutor earns in their first several hours of teaching, and it is there so that somebody who has only just started still has something to recover: without it the figure would be nil for a new tutor, which would not be a limit at all.

This is not the same clause as the sum in section 10.3 and it runs the other way. Section 10.3 is the most you may owe us for taking a family off the platform. This paragraph is the most we may owe you. The two happen to share a £5,000 figure and are otherwise unrelated.

This does not cut across section 12.4.Pay for sessions you have actually completed is not "lost earnings" and is not excluded by this section: we owe it, and a family's payment failing after the event is our problem rather than yours. What is excluded is the work you did not get.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time, for example to reflect changes in the law or in how the platform works. If we make a material change we will publish the updated terms on this page and notify account holders by email at least 14 days before it takes effect. If you do not accept a change you may close your account before that date.

Changing the umbrella company in section 12 is a material change. That company is a tutor's employer, it operates PAYE on their pay and it holds their accrued holiday pay, so replacing it is not an administrative detail and tutors get the same notice as for any other material change.

18. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you live in another part of the UK, you may also bring proceedings in your local courts where the law allows. If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

See also our privacy notice and safeguarding page.