What we hold, and what we refuse

This page describes what the Academy itself collects. Who is responsible for your data (the controller), the legal basis, the organisations that process it for us and your rights, including your right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, are set out in the FEFunding privacy notice, which covers the Academy too.

What the Academy collects

• Feedback. If you use the feedback form, we store your rating, what you wrote and which page or answer it was about. An email address is optional, and is only used to reply to you.
• Questions to Ask FEFunding. When a question needs a written answer, the question and the Academy passages it draws on are sent to an external AI model provider to produce that answer. Answers to common questions are held in our server's memory for up to six hours so a repeat does not need another call. We do not keep a record of the questions people ask.
• Searches that find nothing. When a search returns no results, the search wording (lower-cased, without anything else about you) is kept so we can see what the Academy is missing.
• Rate limiting. To stop the service being overloaded, a short-lived counter keyed on a hash of your IP address is held in memory and not written down.

What stays in your browser

Your reading preferences, the role and streams you chose in Start here, the journey steps you have marked done and the last few pages you read are kept in your own browser's storage. They are not sent to us, and no account is needed. Clearing your browser storage removes them, and each feature has its own reset. What you type into the search and Ask field is not stored, even in your browser.

No learner data

The Academy does not accept ILR files, learner data extracts, spreadsheets or pasted tables. Before anything is sent anywhere, our server checks questions, searches and feedback for things like learner identifiers, dates of birth and contact details, and refuses the request rather than passing it on. That check cannot catch everything, so please do not include learner information.

Questions and requests

For anything about your data, including asking us to remove feedback you sent with an email address, see the FEFunding privacy notice for how to contact us. You can also use the feedback form, but please do not include learner information in it.