A parent's guide to AI study apps: what to check first

The short answer

Ask six questions, and judge the app by whether the answers are findable rather than by whether the marketing sounds reassuring. Every AI study app processes something personal — a photograph of your child's handwriting, a question they were too embarrassed to ask in class — and the differences between a careful product and a careless one are almost entirely in the boring documentation.

The good news is that UK law is unusually specific here. The ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code, known as the Children's Code, has applied since 2021 to online services likely to be used by under-18s in the UK. It gives you a standard to hold an app against, and it is written in language you can actually read.

What happens to the photos and the text

Start with the two questions the marketing page will not answer: does my child's work train somebody's model, and how long is it kept?

Most AI study apps do not run their own models. They send the content to a large provider and get a response back. That is normal and not in itself a problem — but it means there are two retention policies to care about, the app's and the provider's, and two questions about training. A serious product will state that its provider agreement forbids using customer content for training, and will name a deletion period. A vague one will say "we take your privacy seriously" and leave it there.

• Training. Look for an explicit statement that content is not used to train models. "We may use your data to improve our services" is not that statement.
• Retention. Look for a number of days, not "as long as necessary". Photographs of handwriting are the most sensitive thing a revision app holds, and they stop being useful the moment the study pack exists.
• Deletion. You want account deletion available inside the app, not only by emailing support and waiting.
• Selling and advertising. No behavioural advertising and no data sale should be stated plainly. For a service used by minors this is not a nice-to-have.

For comparison, FacilStudy sends the photographs to an AI provider under an agreement that forbids training on them, deletes the compressed images 30 days after the study pack is ready, and offers account deletion from Settings in the app. That is the shape of answer to look for anywhere — a mechanism and a number.

Age gates and the Children’s Code, in plain words

The Children's Code is a set of standards the ICO expects of any online service likely to be accessed by children in the UK. It is not a certification scheme and nobody hands out a badge for it, but the standards are concrete enough to check against.

The parts that matter most to a family choosing a study app:

• High privacy by default. The safest settings should be on when the app is installed, not offered later in a menu.
• Data minimisation. Collect what is needed for the feature and nothing else. A revision app asking for contacts, precise location or a full date of birth should have to justify it.
• Transparency a teenager can read. Privacy information written for the age of the user, not only a 4,000-word policy for adults.
• No nudge techniques. No dark patterns pushing a child towards weaker privacy settings or longer sessions.
• Age appropriate application. The service should know, at least approximately, the age range of its users and act accordingly.

On age, note the trade-off: verifying age precisely means collecting more data about a child, which cuts against minimisation. A reasonable middle path is to check age on the device and store only an age band rather than a date of birth. That is what FacilStudy does — minimum age 13, checked before sign-in and re-checked annually, with no date of birth stored and the date itself never sent to the service.

What "AI tutor" safety should actually mean

A general-purpose chatbot and a study app's tutor are different products even when they share a model underneath. The difference is what happens at the edges of a conversation, and that is where you should look.

A tutor built for a 14-year-old should:

1. Stay on schoolwork. It should decline to be a friend, a therapist or a general chat companion, and say so rather than drifting.
2. Guide before it answers. A hint first, the full answer after a couple of attempts. An app that hands over finished homework is selling a way to avoid learning.
3. Check messages in both directions. Filtering only the child's input is half a system; the model's output needs checking too.
4. Escalate to a human. If a young person raises self-harm, abuse, or anything that needs a real person, the right behaviour is to stop tutoring and point to help — in the UK, Childline on 0800 1111, free and confidential, and 999 in an emergency. An AI should never try to handle that conversation itself.
5. Keep the conversation private from the parent view. This one surprises people. A tutor log that a parent can read is a tutor a frightened teenager will not use honestly.

It is worth telling your teenager the same thing the app should be telling them: AI gets things wrong, confidently. Anything it produces about a subject they are being examined on should be checked against their notes, the textbook or a teacher. That is a useful habit well beyond revision.

Payments when the user is under 18

A child under 18 cannot form a binding contract for most things in UK law, and the app stores handle this in a practical way: the child starts the purchase and the family organiser approves it.

• iOS. Set up Family Sharing and turn on Ask to Buy for the child's account. Every purchase and subscription then needs your approval on your own device.
• Android. Use Google Family Link and require purchase approval on the child's Google account.
• Both. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled, and they are cancelled in the store's subscription settings — not by deleting the app, and usually not by deleting the account inside the app. Check where the cancel path is before you approve, not after.

Two red flags at the payment step: a paywall a child can complete without any adult involvement, and a paywall that hides the price, the renewal or the cancellation route behind a "continue" button. A subscription screen for a young person's app should read as though a parent is going to read it, because one should.

FacilStudy's free tier gives five scans a month and the daily plan. Plus is £4.99 a month through the App Store or Google Play, with the family organiser approving the purchase, and it is cancelled in the store's own settings.

The six-point checklist

Run this on any AI study app, including ours. It takes about fifteen minutes with the privacy policy open, and an app that cannot answer four of the six is not worth the argument later.

1. Who runs it, and are they accountable in the UK? A named operator, a real address, an ICO register entry. FacilStudy: a product of FacilForge, ICO reference ZC232413, with the privacy policy on the site.
2. Is my child's work used to train models? Look for an explicit no. FacilStudy: no — the provider agreement forbids it.
3. How long is content kept, and can we delete it ourselves? A number of days and an in-app delete. FacilStudy: photographs deleted 30 days after the study pack is ready; account and content deletable from Settings.
4. How is age handled? A stated minimum age and the least data needed to enforce it. FacilStudy: 13 and over, age checked on the device, age band stored rather than a date of birth.
5. What are the AI's limits, and where does it escalate? Schoolwork only, hints before answers, and a route to a real person. FacilStudy: the tutor discusses schoolwork only and points to Childline on 0800 1111 if a student appears to need a person rather than a tutor.
6. Who can see what — and who decides? Ask exactly what an adult can see and who grants it. FacilStudy: the student invites one adult as a Study Partner, who sees streak, time studied, mastery per subject, topics needing attention and upcoming tests — never tutor chats, photographs or individual answers — and the student can revoke access at any time.

FacilStudy is pre-launch, so the honest caveat applies: these are the commitments the product is being built to, published so you can hold us to them. If you want to be told when it ships, there is a waiting list.

When to say no

Some signals are strong enough to end the conversation without further research.

• No identifiable operator, no address, no privacy policy — or a policy that is clearly copied and does not match the app.
• An answer-generating app with no learning behaviour at all: photograph the question, receive the finished homework. That is a different product with a different purpose.
• A general-purpose companion chatbot dressed as a study tool, with no topic limits and no escalation.
• Free with heavy advertising and third-party trackers. If the product is free and the model bills are real, the payment is coming from somewhere.
• A subscription a child can start alone, with the cancellation route buried.

Beyond that, the ordinary rules apply: install it together, look at the settings screen once, and agree what happens if it is not helping in a month. If you are also trying to work out whether revision is actually happening, How to tell if your teenager is actually revising and our comparison of what revision apps share with parents cover the rest.