Safeguarding and data: what actually happens

TurtleTime is made by Niall and Paula, a husband-and-wife team with two young children, through our company Social Panda LLC, trading as TurtleTime. A parent uploads a photo and a few details and gets a personalised, illustrated bedtime story with their child as the hero, to read on screen or as a printed hardcover. Families in the UK and the US use it.

We describe TurtleTime as personalised reading for pleasure at home. We do not make claims about reading ages, phonics outcomes or reluctant readers, and we ask settings not to make them on our behalf.

Shares a link. That is the whole involvement.

• We make a family page for your setting and send you a poster and a short newsletter blurb, if you want them.
• You share the page however suits you: newsletter, noticeboard, class group, or not at all.
• There is no login for staff, nothing to install, no list to send us, no money to handle, and no parent queries to field. Anything a parent raises comes to us.
• You can ask us to take the page down at any time and we will do so within one working day.
• We do not use your crest or logo, and we do not quote staff, unless you offer.
• We never contact your families directly. You share the page, we wait.

• Parents visit the page at home and can read a complete example book before they upload anything.
• If they want to try it, they create their own account, add their own child's first name and a photo, and make a story. The first stories each month are free, in full, with no card required.
• If they choose to keep or print a book, the discount on your family page applies automatically.
• Whenever a family prints a book through your page, we make a contribution to your school fund, PTA or nursery book corner. It comes out of our margin, never added to the parent's price.

1. The setting handles no pupil data. No names, photos, class lists or contact details pass between the setting and us, in either direction.
2. Parents create at home, on their own account, with their own photo. The photo is used to draw a cartoon likeness of the child. It is stored privately, is never used to train AI models, and is never shared with the setting or anyone else.
3. Deletion is in the parent's hands. A parent can delete a character and its photos, or any story, from inside their account. They can also email hello@turtletime.ai for complete deletion of their account, which we finish within 30 days.
4. No staff accounts are needed. If we give staff complimentary stories as a thank-you, they are ordinary personal accounts for their own children.
5. No DBS check, no data-sharing agreement, no supplier onboarding. Nothing is procured, no data passes to or from the setting, and no one from TurtleTime ever visits or works with children.
6. AI is used to write and illustrate the stories. Stories are written to strict age-appropriate rules and pass through content safety filters. The parent reads and approves every page before it is printed or shared.
7. No educational-outcome claims. TurtleTime is a bedtime story, not a teaching programme, and we say so.

TurtleTimeis operated from the United States. Family accounts, photos and stories are stored with our hosting and database providers, story text and illustrations are generated by Google's Gemini models (with OpenAI as an automatic fallback), payments are taken by Stripe, and printed books are made and delivered by Gelato. Each provider works under a contract that limits them to doing that job for us, and none of them may use family content to train models.

The full list, our legal bases, retention periods and the rights parents have are in our Privacy Policy. Our Terms of Service require account holders to be adults and to be the parent or guardian of any child they add.

A family's stories are private to their account. A parent can turn on a share link for grandparents, or publish a book to our marketplace after our review; both are their choice and both can be switched off at any time. Your family page shows example books made by us or by families who gave written permission. It never shows your families' books, names or photos.

• The discount for your families and the contribution to your fund are agreed with you in writing before the page goes live. The discount is shown on the page; the contribution is confirmed to you by email and, where your local rules require it, stated on the page too.
• Contributions are paid by us, from our margin. Parents pay the discounted price and nothing more.
• You choose the payee (school fund, PTA or PTO, nursery) and whether to take the contribution as money or as gift books for families you nominate.
• Each term we send a short statement showing books made, books printed and the total raised, whether or not anyone asks.
• Where a PTA or PTO is a registered charity we provide the written agreement and the wording your local rules require for a business raising money alongside a charity.

• Free means free: the free stories can be read in full, with no card and no nagging.
• The family discount does not expire and there is no countdown.
• One welcome email when they make their first story, then only useful service emails. Unsubscribe is one click.
• Their photos are theirs: private, never used to train models, deletable by them.
• No advertising inside TurtleTime, ever.

Write to us at hello@turtletime.ai and one of us will reply personally. If your safeguarding lead or business manager would like a call, we are happy to arrange one. This page can be printed or saved as a PDF for your records; the date and version at the top tell you which edition you have.