Safeguarding & AI Safety

1. Who this is for

MathsTutor.com is used by young people, many aged 11–18. We take that seriously. This page explains, in plain terms, what we do to keep students safe when they use our AI tutor, and what happens if a student says something that worries us. We publish it openly so students, parents, carers, and schools can see exactly how it works.

2. What Mathew is for — and what it is not

Mathew helps with IGCSE and GCSE maths. It is designed to teach through questions rather than just hand over answers. It is not a companion, a friend, or a source of emotional support, and it is not built to discuss anything outside maths. If a conversation drifts away from maths, Mathew will gently steer it back — except in one situation, described next.

3. Our crisis-detection protocol

If a student types something that suggests they may be at risk of harm — for example, mentions of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, or being hurt or abused by someone — our system is designed to:

• Detect it before the AI replies. A check runs on every message before it ever reaches the AI model, so a disclosure like this is never answered with a maths pep-talk.
• Respond with a fixed, caring signpost — not AI text. The student is shown the same trusted, human-written message every time: it tells them they matter, that Mathew is not the right help for this, and lists the free confidential helplines above. This message is never generated by the AI, so it cannot drift or say the wrong thing.
• Encourage a trusted adult. The signpost asks the student to talk to a parent, carer, or teacher they trust.
• Keep a confidential record so a person can review it. When a disclosure is detected we log a secure internal record and send an alert to a monitored mailbox, so a responsible person at MathsTutor.com is aware. These records are kept confidential and used only for safeguarding.

Our detection is deliberately cautious: we would far rather show a caring message when it was not strictly needed than miss a student who was genuinely struggling. It is a safety net, not a diagnosis — it does not replace a real person, and it is not a counselling service.

4. Reporting a concern

If you are a student, parent, carer, or teacher and you have a safeguarding concern about something on MathsTutor.com, you can email us at safeguarding@mathstutor.com. This inbox is monitored. Please remember that for anything urgent or where someone may be in danger, the helplines and emergency numbers at the top of this page will reach trained help far faster than we can.

5. Other safety measures

• Maths-only by design. Mathew is built to stay on maths and to refuse off-topic or inappropriate requests.
• Output checks. Responses are checked for appropriateness for a young audience, and anything flagged is kept for review.
• Teach, don't cheat. Mathew guides students to understand the maths rather than simply doing their homework for them.
• Privacy. How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy.

6. This is a tool, not a person

We will keep saying it because it matters: Mathew is an AI study tool. It can make mistakes, it has no feelings, and it is not aware of you between sessions in the way a person would be. For anything that matters in your life beyond a maths question, please reach out to a real, trusted human. You are not on your own.