Legal
Privacy notice
Last updated 19 October 2026
This notice explains what personal data Synthetic School AI Education collects through this website and through Synthetic School, why we collect it, where it is kept and what rights you have. Every school, student and family inside Synthetic School is synthetic, so the only personal data we hold belongs to the adults who use our website and our product.
Who we are
Synthetic School AI Education is the controller for the personal data described here, unless a section says otherwise. We are being registered in Scotland as a private limited company, and our company number will appear here once it is issued. Until then, the controller is the founder, Jamie Scobie. Our address is The Workshop, Ecclesmachan, Uphall, West Lothian, EH52 6NQ. You can contact us about privacy at hello@synthetic.school.
When a leadership programme, school group or other organisation buys seats for its people, that organisation is the controller of its trainees' play records and we are its processor, under a data processing agreement. We remain the controller for accounts, billing and the anonymised figures we use to calibrate the engine.
When you use this website
If you send a pilot request, we collect your name, work email, organisation, role, school system and what you tell us about your plans. We use it only to reply to your request and to discuss a pilot with you, on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering people who contact us. You can ask us to delete your request at any time. You do not have to give us any of this, but we cannot reply without your name and email.
We keep pilot requests for 12 months after our last contact with you, unless you become a design partner. Requests are received and stored by our website host, Netlify, which may process them in the United States.
If you join the waitlist for individual seats, we keep only your email address. We use it once, with your consent, to tell you when seats open, and then delete it. You can withdraw your consent and ask us to delete it sooner.
When a request arrives, Netlify sends us a copy by email. Emails you send to hello@synthetic.school take the same route. Cloudflare, which runs our domain, passes these emails on without storing them, and Google keeps them in a Gmail mailbox where we read and answer them. We answer emails on the same legitimate interest as pilot requests, and delete them 12 months after the conversation ends unless they lead to a pilot or a contract.
This website uses no analytics and sets no cookies.
When you use Synthetic School
Trainees, coaches and facilitators have accounts. The table shows what we hold about them, why and for how long. Where we are the controller, we hold account data to provide the service under contract, and teachers' transcripts for recognition panels only with each teacher's consent.
| Data | Used for | Where it is kept | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account: name, email, organisation | Sign-in and billing | A UK or EU region | While the account is open |
| Play record: decisions, typed messages, transcripts | Replay and the debrief | A UK or EU region | 12 months after the cohort ends, unless the buyer's agreement sets a shorter period or the trainee keeps it |
| Debrief: accounts, synthesis, coach notes | Learning | A UK or EU region | As the play record |
| Prompts and replies in model calls | Generating the agents' turns | Anthropic, in the US by default, or a regional cloud endpoint where a buyer needs one | Deleted by Anthropic within 30 days, or kept up to 2 years if its safety systems flag a breach of its usage policy |
| Memory notes sent for search | Finding relevant memories for agents | An embeddings provider, named here before the first cohort | Under that provider's terms |
| Voice audio and transcripts, once voice is offered | Spoken conversations | ElevenLabs | Transcripts as the play record; audio deleted once transcribed |
| Teachers' transcripts for recognition panels, with consent | Validation | A UK or EU region, with names removed | Until the validation study is published |
| Aggregates with no names, from groups of at least 5 | Validation and calibration | A UK or EU region | Kept |
Limits we place on ourselves
- The trainee owns the play record. A coach or facilitator sees an individual record only with the trainee's consent, and an employer only when the trainee shares it.
- Nothing leaves the system as a score or a ranking, and contracts bar any use of play records to select, appraise, promote, discipline or rank a school leader.
- Free text is screened for real names before it reaches a model or the log. A trainee is asked to remove any name that matches no one in the synthetic school.
- Synthetic School never infers a trainee's emotions, and no decision about anyone is made by automated means alone.
- Trainee data is encrypted at rest, and deleted on request or when its retention period ends.
Transfers outside the UK and EU
By default, model calls go to Anthropic in the United States. Anthropic's data processing addendum covers these transfers with the EU standard contractual clauses and the UK addendum to them. A buyer who needs data kept in its region can have model calls sent to a regional cloud endpoint instead. We complete a data protection impact assessment for each market before its first cohort.
If voice is offered, ElevenLabs may process audio in the United States, and this notice will set out its safeguards before voice goes live. Pilot requests, waitlist sign-ups and emails to us may also be processed in the United States by Netlify, Cloudflare and Google. All three take part in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and their terms also include standard contractual clauses.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the data we hold about you and to correct it. You may also be able to have it deleted, restrict or object to how we use it, take a copy with you and withdraw consent. Write to hello@synthetic.school to use any of these rights.
You can also complain to a data protection authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office. In the EU it is the authority where you live.
Changes to this notice
We will update this notice when what we do with personal data changes, and change the date at the top.