This policy explains what information Accel Education collects, why we collect it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It covers our website, our student portal, our mock exams, and the emails we send. Accel Education is a Selective Entry Exam tutoring service operating in Victoria, Australia.
Almost everyone we deal with is a parent or guardian arranging something for a child, so most of the information we hold is about a child and was given to us by an adult. That is the fact this whole page is written around.
Where this sits legally
The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) sets out thirteen Australian Privacy Principles. Businesses under a certain annual turnover are generally treated as small business operators and sit outside those principles, subject to a number of exceptions. We are not going to argue either way about which side of that line Accel Education falls on, because it should not change how a child's information is treated, and here it does not. We handle personal information in a way that is consistent with the Australian Privacy Principles, and where this policy makes a promise we mean it as a promise rather than as a statement about our legal category.
Information about children raises the bar rather than lowering it. In practice that means we ask for less than we could, we deal with the parent or guardian rather than the child, we do not use anything about a child for advertising, and we do not publish a photograph of a child without written consent. Where this page and our Child Safety and Wellbeing Policy overlap, on photographs, on who may collect a child, and on who a child's information is shared with, they are written to say the same thing. If you ever find them disagreeing, tell us and we will fix it.
Information we collect
When you enquire about a trial or a place
When you request a free trial class or enquire about a place, we collect the parent or guardian name, the student name, an email address, and optionally a phone number, the student year level, and anything you choose to tell us in the message field. We use these details only to reply to you and to arrange the class.
When you register for the parent webinar
The free parent session collects your name, your email address, and optionally a phone number, your child's year level, how you heard about the session, and any question you would like answered on the night. It does not ask for your child's name. We use it to send you the joining link, a reminder, and the recording afterwards.
When you join the Year 7 Entry waitlist
The Year 7 Entry waitlist collects your name, your email address, optionally a phone number, your child's first name only, their year level, their school, how you heard about us, and anything you write in the message field. The first name alone is deliberate: a waitlist needs to be able to address a child in an email, not identify them on a register, so we ask for less.
When you register a child for a mock exam
Our mock exams are free, open to families who are not enrolled with us, and sat under exam conditions in a hired hall. Registration collects rather more than the other forms on this site, because a hall full of children on a Saturday morning has requirements a web form does not.
The registration form collects:
- Your child: first name and last name, year level in 2026, and the school they attend. The year level and the school are required, because the report is banded by year level and the register at the door is sorted by school and surname.
- You: parent or guardian name, email address, and mobile number. The mobile is required here and optional everywhere else on the site, for one reason: it is the number we call on the morning if your child has not been collected.
- Which sections your child sits. Every child sits every section, so we record all of them against every registration. It drives how many papers of each type are printed.
- How you heard about the mock, if you tell us. It is optional and it is used to work out which of our own efforts are worth repeating.
- Anything else we should know, in an optional free text field. See Health and other sensitive information below, because this is the field where that lands.
- Your answer to two optional consent questions, about anonymised work and aggregate statistics. Both are unticked by default. See The consents we ask for below.
- Whether you would like the free results session, a one-to-one Zoom call going through the score breakdown after the papers are marked.
- Whether you would like the parent webinar link, while that evening is still ahead of us. Ticking it registers you for the webinar as well, which means your details are also held as a webinar registration.
We also record whether the registration took a seat or went onto the waitlist, and whether it was later cancelled. A cancelled registration is marked as cancelled rather than deleted, because the contact details and the consent answers on it outlive the booking. You can ask us to delete it outright at any time.
We do not ask for photo or video consent, and we do not photograph or film children at a mock exam for publication. Every registration is stored at the most restrictive setting, meaning no photographs and no name alongside a photograph. A question nobody was asked cannot be read as a yes. If we ever want to take photographs at a sitting, we will ask for consent in writing at the venue rather than treating a silent registration as permission.
On the morning of a mock exam
We keep a printed attendance sheet at the door. It exists so that no child is unaccounted for at dismissal, and it is a child safety record rather than an administrative one. After the event we transcribe it into the same registration record, which then holds:
- whether your child attended the sitting;
- the time your child arrived and the time they left;
- the name of the adult your child was released to, and the name of the adult you nominated in advance as permitted to collect them;
- any note about the day that matters afterwards, for example that a child left early or sat a section in a separate room.
Nominating someone in writing means exactly that: an email or a text message from you naming the person and their relationship to your child. We keep that message, and we write the name onto the sheet. The person you nominate has not used our website and has not agreed to anything, so we hold their name and their relationship to your child and nothing else, and we use it for one purpose, which is confirming that the person at the door is the person you named.
Nothing is entered into the database during the event. The hall may have no usable signal and a signature cannot be collected on a phone, so paper is the record on the day and it is transcribed afterwards.
After a mock exam
We mark every paper and send you a report. If your child was on the waitlist rather than in a seat, we also ask whether you would like to hear about the next sitting, and we record your answer and the date you gave it.
The link in that email carries a random token that identifies your registration and nothing else. It is deliberately not the record's own identifier, so it can be changed without touching anything else, and the preference only changes when you press a button on the page it opens. A link that changed something merely by being fetched would be pressed by your mail provider scanning the message rather than by you.
We also offer every family the free results session, and the emails before and after the sitting carry a button for it. Those emails use a random token of their own, separate from the waitlist one above and equally unconnected to anything but your registration. Pressing a button on the page it opens records whether you want the call and when you answered, and you can change that answer at any time from the same page or by replying to the email.
When you apply to tutor for us
A tutoring application is about you rather than about a child. It collects your name, email address, phone number, the subjects you want to teach, your availability, your own results and teaching background, and why you want the job. We use it to assess the application and to contact you about it.
When your child is enrolled
Enrolled families receive a one-time signup code to create a student portal account. Through the portal we hold:
- Account details, being the email address and password used to log in. Passwords are stored in hashed form by our authentication provider and are never visible to us.
- Student records, such as the student's name, the subjects they are enrolled in, and which portal features are enabled for them.
- Homework submissions, including photographs or scans of the student's own handwritten work that are uploaded for marking, and the feedback we return.
- Practice and progress data, such as practice sessions, questions attempted, answers given, and results, so both the student and we can see how they are progressing.
- A log of the emails we have sent you, recording what was sent, when, and to which address, so we can tell what you have already been told and avoid sending it twice.
Information collected automatically
We use Vercel Analytics to understand, in aggregate, how the site is used. It does not use cookies and does not build a profile of individual visitors. Our hosting provider also keeps standard server logs (for example, IP addresses and request times) for security and reliability.
Advertising measurement
When we advertise, we use the Meta pixel on our public marketing pages so we can tell which advertisements lead to someone registering for a mock exam or a trial class. It sets cookies in your browser and reports page views and completed registrations to Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram.
We limit it deliberately, and these limits are enforced in our code rather than left to habit:
- It does not run on any page you reach after signing in. Nothing from behind the sign-in reaches Meta: not an account, not marked work, not results.
- It does not run on the free practice test, because students use that page themselves.
- It sends no names, email addresses, phone numbers or results. We have switched off the Meta setting that would otherwise collect details from our forms automatically.
You can block this entirely in your browser settings or with a tracker blocker, and everything on this site will continue to work.
Health and other sensitive information
Health information is sensitive information under the Privacy Act and gets stricter handling than ordinary personal information. We collect it in one place, and only if you volunteer it.
The mock exam registration form ends with an optional free text field, prompted with “Access needs, a medical condition, an allergy, or anything else that matters on the day”. Some parents use it to tell us about asthma, an allergy, a diagnosed condition, or an adjustment their child needs in order to sit a long paper fairly. Here is how that is handled.
- It is optional. You can leave it blank, register normally, and tell us on the morning instead.
- Why we ask. So the day works for your child. We do not use it for anything else, we do not use it to decide whether to accept a registration, and it never goes into teaching or marketing material.
- Who sees it. Accel Education staff, and any adult supervising on the day who needs to know in order to keep your child safe. It is not shared with other parents or with other students.
- How it is stored. In the same record as the rest of the registration, with the same protections, and it is included in the registration alert email our email provider delivers to us.
- How long we keep it. This is the one field we aim to delete early rather than on the general schedule. See How long we keep it below.
If you would rather not write it down at all, email or phone us instead and we will handle it the same way.
The consents we ask for
At mock exam registration we ask two separate opt-in questions, both unticked by default. Neither is required, and a registration with both left unticked is treated exactly the same as one with both ticked.
- Anonymised work as a teaching example. Permission to use the answers your child gives as a teaching example, with the name removed.
- Aggregate statistics. Permission to include the results, without the name, in aggregate statistics we use to build and calibrate our reporting. This one has a long horizon on purpose: it is what lets us compare results across sittings and set meaningful bands, so the de-identified figures stay in that set after the individual record has gone.
You can withdraw either consent at any time by emailing us. We will stop using the work or the results in anything new from that point.
Why we are allowed to collect it
We collect personal information because it is reasonably necessary for running a tutoring service: teaching a child, marking their work, reporting on how they are going, and running an in-person exam safely. Everything on this page is either given to us directly by a parent or guardian, or generated by using the service, and we collect it for the purposes described here and not for others.
Sensitive information, which in practice means health information in the notes field, is collected only where you volunteer it and only with your consent, and it is used solely to make the day work for your child. The two consent questions above are the only places where we ask permission for a further use, and both are opt-in.
Because our students are children, we rely on the enrolling parent or guardian having the authority to give us the information about their child. We deal with the parent rather than the child on everything in this policy.
How we use your information
We use the information we collect to:
- respond to enquiries and arrange trial classes;
- run mock exams, which means printing the right papers, running the register at the door, marking, and returning a report;
- keep children safe at an in-person event, which is what the mobile number, the attendance sheet and the nomination messages are for;
- set up and run student portal accounts;
- mark homework, track progress, and provide teaching and feedback;
- send parents personalised updates on how their child is progressing;
- tell waitlist families when a seat or a stream comes free;
- keep the service secure, and improve how our classes and resources work.
We do not sell your information. We do not use the details you give us, or anything held in the student portal, for advertising. The only exception is the limited, non-identifying measurement described under Advertising measurement above, which tells us whether an advertisement led to a registration and nothing about who you are.
Children's privacy
Accel Education is intended to be used by parents and guardians on behalf of their children, or by students with their parent or guardian's knowledge and consent. We rely on the enrolling parent or guardian having authority to provide the student's information to us. If you believe a child's information has been provided to us without the appropriate consent, please contact us and we will remove it.
A parent or guardian exercises every right in this policy on their child's behalf. Older students sometimes email us themselves, and we will always help a student with their own work, but we do not release account information or personal records to a student without their parent being involved.
How we store and protect your information
We keep your information using trusted third-party services that process it on our behalf:
- Supabase hosts our database, our login system, and the private file storage that holds homework photographs and lesson recordings. It holds everything stored in the database, including mock exam registrations, attendance records, the notes field, student records and marked work.
- Resend sends our email: registration confirmations, the alerts we send ourselves, and parent updates. It sees the contents of those emails, which includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and anything written into a message or notes field.
- Vercel hosts the website and the portal, and provides the aggregate, cookieless analytics described above. It sees server logs, including IP addresses.
- Meta receives page views and completed registrations from our public marketing pages when we are advertising, as described under Advertising measurement above. It receives no personal details and nothing from behind a sign-in.
These providers are based overseas and may store or process information on servers outside Australia, including in the United States. Homework photographs and lesson recordings are held in a private storage bucket with no public link, passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and are not visible to us, and portal access is per account so a student can only reach their own work. No online service can be guaranteed completely secure, and we are not going to claim otherwise. If we ever became aware of a breach involving your child's information, we would tell you.
Who we share it with
We share information with the four service providers listed above, to the extent needed to run Accel Education, and where we are required to by law or where there is a serious and imminent threat to someone's safety. Beyond that, we do not share your child's information with anyone else without your written consent. That is the same standard our Child Safety and Wellbeing Policy sets, and it says written rather than simply consent on purpose.
How long we keep it
We are a small operation and we do not run an automated deletion system. What we do instead is review these lists at least once a year and delete what we no longer need. The periods below are what we aim for, stated honestly as an intention rather than as a claim that a program runs nightly to enforce them.
- Mock exam registrations: about 12 months after the sitting, so we can answer questions about a report and offer the next mock to the families who missed out on a seat.
- The free text notes field on a mock registration, including anything you told us about a medical condition, an allergy or an access need: about 3 months after the sitting, once the results and the follow-up are done. The rest of the registration stays.
- The signed paper attendance sheet: destroyed once the arrival and release details have been entered into the register, within about a week of the event.
- Written messages nominating who may collect a child: about 12 months after the event.
- Trial requests, enquiries and webinar registrations from families who never enrol: about 24 months.
- Year 7 Entry waitlist entries: reviewed annually, and removed once the child has aged out of Year 7 entry or you have asked us to remove them.
- Tutor applications: about 12 months after a decision.
- Student records, marked homework and progress data: while the student is enrolled and for about 24 months after their last class, so a family who comes back does not start from nothing.
- Parent update emails and the log of what was sent: about 24 months.
- De-identified aggregate results: kept indefinitely, because they can no longer be linked to a child.
How to see, correct or delete what we hold
Email hello@acceleducation.com.au and tell us what you want: a copy of what we hold, a correction, or a deletion. Say your child's name and, if it is about a mock exam, the sitting they registered for. We will check that you are the parent on the record before we hand anything over, which is the point of checking rather than an obstacle, and we will respond within a reasonable time and normally within 30 days.
If you ask us to delete a mock exam registration, that means the whole record: your details, your child's details, the notes field, the consent answers, and the attendance entry if the event has already happened. If you ask us to delete a student account, that means the account, the student record, the uploaded homework files and the progress data attached to it. The only things that survive a deletion request are records we are required to keep for tax or legal reasons, and de-identified figures that can no longer be linked to your child.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, tell us first at the same address, and we will look into it and write back with what we found. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992. You can go to the OAIC directly, you do not need our permission, and complaining does not affect your child's place with us.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will change the date at the top of this page. Significant changes will be communicated to enrolled families directly rather than relying on you noticing a date.
Contact us
For any privacy question or request, email us at hello@acceleducation.com.au.