Acceptable Use Policy

Last updated 3 November 2026

Acceptable use

This policy applies to everyone who uses our website at https://sunbeameducation.com/ or the Sunbeam Education platform at https://app.sunbeameducation.com/ (together, our site), including tutors, customers and anyone who writes a review. It applies to any material you upload, post, send or create on our site, including tutor profiles, listings, photos, videos, messages and reviews (User Content), to any contact you have with other users of our site, and to any other way you use our site.

If you are a tutor, this policy forms part of our Platform Contract (https://sunbeameducation.com/platform-contract/). If you are a customer, our Terms of Service (https://sunbeameducation.com/terms-of-service/) require you to follow it.

You must comply with these standards in spirit as well as to the letter, both in relation to User Content and when dealing directly with other users of our site, including tutors, customers and customers’ children.  

AP Tutoring Limited, trading as Sunbeam Education, will decide, acting reasonably, whether any User Content or your use of our site breaches this policy. If it does, we may remove the content. If you are a tutor, we may also suspend or restrict your listings or end our agreement with you, as set out in our Platform Contract, which also explains how much notice we give you, when we give you our reasons and how you can complain. If you are a customer and you seriously or repeatedly break this policy, we may also end our contract with you and cancel your upcoming sessions with any tutor, refunding any you have paid for that haven’t taken place, as set out in our Terms of Service. We may also report the matter to the police or other relevant authorities.

You may not use our site:

• In any way that breaches any local, national or international law or regulation.
• In any way that is unlawful or fraudulent or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect.
• For the purpose of harming or attempting to harm minors in any way.
• To bully, insult, intimidate or humiliate any person.
• To send, knowingly receive, upload, download, share, post, use or re-use any material which does not comply with these acceptable use standards.
• To transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or promotional material or any other form of similar solicitation (spam).
• If you are a tutor, to contact customers you have met through our site for the purpose of arranging sessions outside of our site.
• To knowingly transmit any data, send or upload any material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of any computer software or hardware.

User Content:

• Must be accurate (where it states facts).
• Must only contain opinions that are genuinely held.
• Must comply with the law applicable in any country from which it is posted and to which our site is targeted.

User Content must not:

• Be defamatory of any person.
• Be obscene, offensive, hateful or inflammatory.
• Infringe any copyright, database right or trade mark of any other person.
• Include video content that has been or would be likely to be given an R18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
• Include video content not suitable for BBFC classification.
• Include material that might impair the physical, mental or moral development of persons under the age of 18.
• Be likely to deceive any person.
• Breach any legal duty owed to a third party, such as a contractual duty or a duty of confidence.
• Contain illegal content or promote any illegal content or activity.
• Be in contempt of court.
• Be threatening or abusive, invade another person’s privacy, or be intended to cause needless anxiety.
• Be intended or likely to harass or alarm any other person.
• Impersonate any person or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person.
• Give the impression that the User Content emanates from Sunbeam Education, if this is not the case.
• Advocate, promote, incite any party to commit, or assist any unlawful or criminal act such as (by way of example only) copyright infringement or computer misuse.
• Contain a statement which you know or believe, or have reasonable grounds for believing, that members of the public to whom the statement is, or is to be, published are likely to understand as a direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement to the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
• Be pornographic.

An honest review or complaint is not a breach of this policy just because it is negative or the person it is about finds it upsetting.

Reviews

We invite customers by email to review a tutor after their 5th session with that tutor, and send one reminder 7 days later. Customers can also review a tutor from their online account once they have had a session with them. Tutors can also use the tutor interface to invite a genuine former student (or their parent or carer) whom they taught outside our site to review them. We email the review link to the address the tutor gives us, and our team checks each of these reviews before it is published.

Reviews must be about the reviewer’s own genuine experience of a tutor’s sessions. You must not:

• Write a review of a tutor whose sessions you or your child have not had, or of yourself.
• Write a review for someone else, or pretend to be someone else when writing a review.
• Offer, give or accept money, a discount, free sessions or any other reward for writing, changing or removing a review.
• Pressure anyone to write, change or remove a review.
• Include links to other websites, email addresses, phone numbers or social media details in a review.

If you are a tutor, you must not write reviews of your own services or ask anyone else to write them for you, and you must only invite genuine former students (or their parents or carers) to review you. Apart from the invitations described above, you must not contact customers to encourage them to write a review or a favourable review, or to change or remove a review.

Please don’t include your child’s name or any other personal or sensitive information, such as health details, in a review.

We don’t remove a review, or refuse to publish it, just because it is negative.

Illegal content

In addition, you must not use our site in any way that involves:

• Terrorism offences.
• Child sexual exploitation or abuse offences including grooming and child sexual abuse material.
• Encouraging or assisting suicide (or attempted suicide) or serious self-harm offences.
• Harassment, stalking, making threats or abuse offences.
• Hate offences.
• Controlling or coercive behaviour offence.
• Drugs or psychoactive substance offences.
• Firearms or other weapons offences.
• Unlawful immigration or human trafficking offences.
• Sexual exploitation of adults offences.
• Extreme pornography offence.
• Intimate image abuse offences. 
• Proceeds of crime offences.
• Fraud and financial services offences.
• Foreign interference offences.
• Animal cruelty offences.

Content very harmful to children

The following must not be uploaded, shared or generated on our site, and never be shared with any customers or the children of any customers:

• Pornographic content.
• Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide.
• Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for an act of deliberate self-injury.
• Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for an eating disorder or behaviours associated with an eating disorder.

Other content harmful to children

You must not upload, post, create on our site or share any of the following:

• Content that is abusive and which targets any of the following characteristics: race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender reassignment.
• Content which incites hatred against people:
  • of a particular race (including colour, nationality, and ethnic or national origins), religion (including lack of religion), sex or sexual orientation;
  • who have a physical or mental disability; or
  • who have the characteristic of gender reassignment (meaning the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex).
• Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for an act of serious violence against a person.
• Bullying content.
• Content which:
  • depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person (real or not);
  • depicts the real or realistic serious injury of a person (real or not).
• Content which:
  • depicts real or realistic serious violence against an animal (real or not);
  • depicts the real or realistic serious injury of an animal (real or not);
  • realistically depicts serious violence against a fictional creature or the serious injury of a fictional creature in graphic detail.
• Content which encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt likely to result in injury to the person who does it or to someone else.
• Content which encourages a person to ingest, inject, inhale or in any other way self-administer:
  • a physically harmful substance; 
  • a substance in such a quantity as to be physically harmful.

Offences

You must not upload, communicate, send, post, create on our site, share or cause any uploading, posting, creation or sharing, of any of the following:

• A grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message intending to cause offence, menace, distress or anxiety.
• A false message knowing it to be false, intending to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, and with no reasonable excuse.
• A message threatening death or serious harm while intending or being reckless as to whether the object of the threat would fear that the threat would be carried out.
• Flashing images when it is reasonably foreseeable that an individual with epilepsy will see them and the sender intended that the individual would suffer harm and the sender has no reasonable excuse for sending the images.
• A communication that intends to encourage serious self-harm.
• An unsolicited sexual image, including a manufactured intimate image or “deepfake” intending the recipient to be caused alarm, distress or humiliation, or for the purpose of sexual gratification and being reckless as to whether the recipient will be caused alarm, distress or humiliation.
• A sexually explicit deepfake.

Additional provisions for video content

For the avoidance of doubt, for any User Content in the form of video content:

• You must not upload a video containing criminal material (such as material relating to terrorism, child sexual exploitation and abuse, racism or xenophobia), material that has been or would be likely to be given an R18 certificate or refused classification by the BBFC, or other material that might impair the physical, mental or moral development of persons under the age of 18 (restricted material). If you become aware that a video you have uploaded contains restricted material, you must tell us immediately.
• You must not upload a video containing material inciting violence or hatred against a group of persons or a member of a group of persons based on any of the following grounds: sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or other belief, political opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation.

Advertising

You must not upload, post, create on our site or share content that advertises or promotes any goods or services other than the tutoring services you offer through our site.

Tutor profiles and listings must not include links to other websites, email addresses, phone numbers or social media details. In messages, you may share a link only where it is needed for tutoring booked through our site, for example the Google Meet link for a session or a learning resource. Tutors must never use a link or any contact details to arrange or take payment for sessions outside our site.

You must not upload a video containing advertising for any of the following:

• Cigarettes and other tobacco products, electronic cigarettes or electronic cigarette refill containers, and prescription-only medicine; or
• Alcoholic drinks.

Any advertising included in a video you upload must not:

• Prejudice respect for human dignity.
• Include or promote discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation.
• Encourage behaviour prejudicial to health or safety.
• Encourage behaviour grossly prejudicial to the protection of the environment.
• Cause physical, mental or moral detriment to persons under the age of 18.
• Directly exhort such persons to purchase or rent goods or services in a manner which exploits their inexperience or credulity.
• Directly encourage such persons to persuade their parents or others to purchase or rent goods or services.
• Exploit the trust of such persons in parents, teachers or others.
• Unreasonably show such persons in dangerous situations.

You must tell us if, as far as you know or can reasonably be expected to know, any video you upload contains advertising.

How we check content

Our team checks tutor profiles, photos and videos before they appear on our site, and checks any changes to them before they go live.

Reviews from customers are checked automatically for offensive language. A review that fails this check is not published unless a member of our team approves it. Our team checks every review from someone a tutor taught outside our site before it is published.

Until a customer and a tutor have had a session together through our site (including a free introductory session), our platform automatically hides phone numbers, email addresses, web links, social media usernames, the names of other messaging and video apps, and phrases such as “contact me directly” in their messages. They are replaced with the word “Redacted” and a note explaining why is added to the message. This helps to keep children safe and to keep bookings and payments on our site.

Our team may read messages when we look into a concern, complaint or suspected misuse, and may delete messages that break this policy.

Reporting content or behaviour

If you think a child is in immediate danger, call 999.

If you see anything on our site that you think is illegal or breaks this policy, including a message, profile, photo, video or review, or you are worried about how someone is behaving towards a child, tell us as soon as possible by email at info@sunbeameducation.com or through our contact form at https://sunbeameducation.com/contact/. You can also call us on +44 7557 308376 or write to us at AP Tutoring Limited, Brook Cottage, Filkins, Lechlade, GL7 3JQ. Please tell us what the content is, where you saw it and who posted or sent it. Use the same contact details for anything this policy asks you to tell us about a video you have uploaded.

We look into every report. If we find that content is illegal or breaks this policy, we will remove it, and we may take the other steps described under Acceptable use above.

If we remove your content or take other action under this policy and you think we have made a mistake, contact us at info@sunbeameducation.com and a member of our team will review the decision. Tutors can also complain under our Tutor Complaints Policy (https://sunbeameducation.com/tutor-complaints-policy/). Customers can also complain about our services under our Customer Care Policy (https://sunbeameducation.com/customer-care-policy/).