This notice is for anyone who applies, or has applied, to teach through ShamBits Academy, and for approved and former Teachers. It is separate from our Main Privacy Notice, which covers Account Owners and Students.

1. Who we are

Shambits LTD ("ShamBits", "we", "us", "our"), company number 14700340, registered office 86-90 Paul Street, London, England, EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom, is the controller of the personal data described in this notice. Contact us at hello@shambits.com.

2. Application information we collect

When you apply to teach with us, we collect: your name, contact details, nationality and country of residence, time zone, self-declared gender, a display name and professional headline/bio, your native dialect, languages and proficiency, the courses you're willing to teach, your declared eligibility to teach particular age groups and genders of learner, your education history and work experience, details of your internet connection and equipment (webcam, microphone), and your declared weekly availability.

3. Documents you provide

As part of your application, we ask you to upload: a CV (required), a degree certificate (required), a teaching certificate (if applicable), a passport or national identity document for identity verification (required — see clause 4), a profile photo, a short introductory video, and — see clause 3A below — an official Certificate of Good Conduct or the appropriate equivalent for your country. These are stored securely and only made available to authorised ShamBits staff reviewing your application.

3A. Certificate of Good Conduct / criminal-record information

Because our Teachers work one-to-one with children, we also require an official Certificate of Good Conduct, police clearance certificate, or the equivalent government-issued criminal-record document for your country of residence — for example, applicants based in Jordan are asked for the official Jordanian Certificate of Good Conduct.

Why we check it: solely to assess your suitability to work with children from a safeguarding perspective, before you can be approved to teach, and periodically thereafter.

Freshness: your certificate must have been issued within the 3 months before your final approval. Once approved, we ask you to provide a current certificate again at least every 12 months, and sooner if we have a genuine safeguarding or security reason to ask for re-verification.

Who can access it: a small number of specifically authorised ShamBits staff involved in safeguarding-relevant application review — not the same broad group who can see your CV or qualifications, given the more sensitive nature of this document.

How we verify it: an authorised member of our team checks the document against your application and records the outcome (verified or not, and when).

Retention: for your initial application, we keep the certificate image only until 90 days after your application reaches a final decision (approval or rejection) — the same period and timing as your identity document (clause 4). Where you later provide a certificate for periodic re-verification as an approved Teacher (see above), we keep that certificate image only until 90 days after it is verified. In both cases, after deletion we retain only a minimal record that verification took place — document type, issuing country, issue date, verification outcome, and when it was verified — not the certificate image, and not any offence or conviction detail it may contain.

What we do not do: we do not build a database of criminal-offence details, and we do not store more detail from this document than we need to record that verification took place.

4. Identity verification and the 90-day rule for your ID document

We use the identity document you provide solely to verify your identity before you're approved to teach. The document image itself is physically deleted no later than 90 days after your application is approved or rejected. After that point, we retain only a minimal record that verification took place — for example the document type and the outcome — not the image. If we ever need to re-verify your identity later (for example if a document expires, your details change, or there is a genuine safeguarding or security reason), we may ask you to provide a document again, on the same terms.

Note that the Certificate of Good Conduct described in clause 3A is a separate document with its own retention approach, because it's a more sensitive category of information than an identity document.

5. How we assess your application

We use the information and documents you provide to assess your suitability to teach, including through an interview and, in some cases, a short assessed mock lesson. Your declared course, language, and age/gender-category eligibility are checked and, on approval, become the specific entitlements you're approved to teach against.

6. Availability

We use your declared weekly availability to determine which lessons you can be assigned.

7. Student assignments

Once approved, we share with you the information you need to teach your assigned students — for example, a student's name, age, course, and schedule. See our Main Privacy Notice for how we handle student data more broadly; as a Teacher, you are separately bound by confidentiality and data-handling obligations under your Independent Contractor Teacher Agreement.

7A. Your video and audio during lessons

As described in our Independent Contractor Teacher Agreement, live lessons are recorded as a standard part of the service (see our Main Privacy Notice, clause 8, for how this works generally). This means your own live video and audio — not just the student's — are captured and processed as part of that recording, for the same safeguarding, quality-assurance, and dispute-review purposes.

Recordings are accessible only to authorised ShamBits administrators, are kept for up to 30 days, and are then permanently and physically deleted — the same retention approach described in our Main Privacy Notice. You do not have access to lesson recordings yourself.

8. Attendance and reschedule monitoring

We record when you join and leave a lesson, and we monitor how often you reschedule lessons more than 24 hours before their scheduled start, as one measure of service reliability. This is monitoring, not a fixed cap — see our Independent Contractor Teacher Agreement for how this information may be used.

9. Lesson reports

We keep the lesson reports you submit after each lesson, as part of the record of the service delivered to the student and to support quality and safeguarding review.

10. Performance and feedback

We keep the private feedback submitted about your lessons (by you and separately by the account owner) for quality-monitoring and safeguarding purposes. This feedback is not published or shown to other users.

11. Suspension and termination records

If your access is paused, restricted, suspended, or terminated, we keep a record of the relevant decision and its reasons, in line with our Independent Contractor Teacher Agreement.

12. Earnings information

We keep records of the lessons you deliver and the earnings calculated from them, so that we can pay you correctly and maintain our own financial and accounting records.

13. Encrypted payout details

The bank or payout details you provide (for example, account details for payment via Wise) are encrypted at rest using industry-standard encryption, and access to them by our staff is logged. We use this information only to pay you.

14. Manual payout process (Wise)

Payments to you may be sent by bank transfer processed through Wise or a similar channel. In some cases, an authorised member of our staff manually initiates this transfer using the payout details you've provided — this is an operational detail of how the payment is sent, not a change to what information about you is shared with Wise beyond what's needed to make the transfer.

15. Audit and security information

We keep records of certain account and security-relevant activity connected with your Teacher account, to help us maintain platform security and investigate any suspected misuse.

16. Overseas processing and international transfers

If you're based outside the United Kingdom, your role as a Teacher may itself involve an international transfer of student personal data to you (see our Main Privacy Notice, clause 17), and may also mean that some of your own personal data is processed by us or our providers outside the country where you're based. We only give you operational access to student data once we have completed an internal country-level compliance review for your country of residence and, where relevant, put in place a UK International Data Transfer Agreement or another appropriate safeguard covering your access.

17. How long we keep your information

We keep your application and, if approved, your ongoing Teacher information for as long as necessary for the purposes described in this notice, in line with our internal data retention schedule — for example, your raw identity document is deleted after 90 days (clause 4) regardless of whether your application is approved or rejected, and your Certificate of Good Conduct is deleted no later than 90 days after your application reaches a final decision for your initial certificate, or 90 days after verification for a later periodic re-verification certificate (clause 3A), while other categories (such as approved-teacher profile information, earnings, and payout records) are retained for longer periods set out in our internal retention schedule, available on request.

18. Your rights

You may have the right to ask us to give you access to your personal data, correct it, erase it, restrict how we use it, object to certain uses, or (where relevant) move it to another provider.

19. Contact and complaints

To exercise your rights, or if you have any question or complaint about how we handle your personal data, contact us at hello@shambits.com. You also have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).