Terms of Service

Last updated: 23 September 2026

These Terms govern your use of SYE Code (the "Service"), operated by Smash Your Exams Education Ltd (a company registered in England & Wales, company no. 15461413), with its registered office at 42 Hampstead Close, Blyth, NE24 3XE ("we", "us"). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.

1. The Service

SYE Code is an online coding-practice platform. It provides programming challenges, an in-browser code editor (IDE), automated checking of your work, an AI tutor that offers hints and explanations, and — for schools — classes, assignments and a gradebook. We may add, change or remove features over time.

2. Eligibility & age

Individual and teacher accounts are intended for users aged 18 or over (or capable of forming a binding contract). Pupils access the Service through their school: the school creates and manages pupil accounts and is responsible for obtaining any consents required and for supervising pupils' use. We do not knowingly create direct individual accounts for children outside the school context.

3. Accounts & security

• You're responsible for keeping your login details confidential and for activity under your account.
• Provide accurate information and keep it up to date.
• Tell us promptly at support@smashyourexams.com if you suspect unauthorised access.
• We may suspend or close accounts that breach these Terms or are used unlawfully.

4. Subscriptions, renewal, cancellation & refunds

• Paid plans are billed in advance through our payment processor, Stripe.
• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless cancelled beforehand.
• You can cancel at any time; cancellation stops future renewals and access continues until the end of the period already paid for.
• Individual plans are available monthly or annually.
• Refunds (individual plans): As a consumer you have a 14-day cooling-off period from the date of purchase. Because the Service is digital content you can access immediately, by starting to use it you ask us to begin supply straight away and you acknowledge that you lose the cooling-off right once you do. After that, you can cancel at any time to stop future renewals, but we do not refund the unused part of a period already paid for, and access continues until the end of that period. Your statutory consumer rights are not affected, and we will always put right a genuine fault or a duplicate charge.
• We may change prices on renewal; we'll give reasonable notice before any change takes effect.

5. School licences & seats

Schools may purchase a licence covering a number of pupil/teacher seats. The school is responsible for how seats are allocated and used, for managing its members and pupils, and for complying with its own obligations as data controller. Use of pupil data is governed by the Data Processing Agreement (DPA) between the school and us, alongside these Terms.

Licence tiers. School licences are priced annually per school, and the seat cap is the total number of pupils across the school:

• Starter — £149/year. 1 class, up to 60 students.
• Department — £349/year. Unlimited classes, up to 250 students.
• Whole school — £549/year. Unlimited classes, up to 1,500 students.

Agreed variations and free pilots. Where we have agreed something different with your school in writing — for example a Starter licence covering two teaching groups rather than one, or a free trial period for a whole class before you buy — that agreement applies to your school in place of the line above, and the seat and class limits your teachers see in the teacher area are always the ones actually in force for you. A free pilot gives full access for a fixed period at no charge; when it ends nothing is deleted — your classes, logins and pupils' work remain, and your teachers simply cannot add more classes or pupils until a licence is purchased.

Multi-academy trusts and multi-school orders are quoted individually — please contact us. The tiers and prices above are the ones in force at the date of these Terms; the current list is always the one shown on our information for finance teams page, and we may change prices from time to time. A change never affects a licence you have already been invoiced for.

We are not VAT registered, so our invoices carry no VAT and no VAT is charged on top of the prices above.

How to pay. A school does not need a card to get started. Ask us for an invoice — by choosing Request invoice / PO in the teacher area, or by emailing support@smashyourexams.com with your school name, chosen tier and PO number — and we will email a proforma invoice. Payment can be made by BACS bank transfer or by card, processed by Stripe. Our full supplier details — company number, registered address, VAT status, bank/BACS details, your PO number, the amount due and the due date — are set out on that invoice, and we will send them sooner on request so you can set us up as a supplier.

Payment terms are 30 days from the date of the invoice. Please quote the invoice number, and your PO number where you have one, as the payment reference. We activate the licence when we receive your purchase order, which is a binding commitment to pay, so your teachers are not left waiting for the payment itself to clear. Where a school pays by card without a purchase order, the licence is activated on payment.

School licence fees are non-refundable, including for unused time or a later reduction in pupil numbers. If you need to adjust an order (for example, the number of seats), contact us within 30 days of the licence start date and we will do our best to accommodate the change. This does not affect a school's statutory rights.

Licence term. A school licence runs for 12 months from the date we activate it. Unlike an individual subscription, it does not renew automatically and no further payment is taken without a new order from you; we will contact your billing contact before it expires so you can decide whether to renew.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• abuse, overload or attempt to break the IDE, the AI features or our infrastructure;
• use the AI tutor or code execution to generate or run harmful, illegal or malicious content;
• scrape, crawl, or use automated tools to extract challenges, content or data from the Service;
• share or resell access, or circumvent seat limits or paywalls;
• upload unlawful content, infringe others' rights, or interfere with other users.

7. The AI tutor, and safeguarding

The AI tutor and automated marking provide guidance to support learning. They can be wrong, incomplete or out of date and are not guaranteed to be correct. Treat AI output as a hint, not a definitive answer, and don't rely on it as professional advice. To provide these features, your code and the relevant challenge are sent to our AI provider (see the Privacy Policy).

What we screen, and when

Messages a student sends to the AI tutor are screened automatically before they reach the tutor, for indications of self-harm or of harm to the student or someone else, and separately for offensive language. The screen runs in two passes: a fixed list of phrases held in our own software, which works even if our AI provider is unavailable, followed by our provider's separate moderation model, which can only raise the level of concern and never lower it. Only messages to the tutor are screened. Pupil code is not screened, and nor are the code-explanation and error-help features.

What happens when something is flagged

Where a message indicates possible harm, the tutor does not answer the question. The student is instead shown fixed wording we have written ourselves — never a generated reply — pointing them to Childline, Samaritans and Shout, asking them to speak to an adult they trust, and telling them to call 999 if anyone is in immediate danger. This response is shown even if the student has reached their daily message limit, and even if the school has not yet named a safeguarding lead. Where a school has switched the AI tutor off altogether, its pupils have no tutor to write to, so no screening takes place and this response is never shown; safeguarding for those pupils rests entirely with the school's own arrangements, as it does elsewhere in the school.

At the same time we email the school's named safeguarding lead, and separately the student's class teachers and school administrators. Those emails never repeat what the child wrote. They say what kind of concern was flagged and which student it concerns, and link the reader in to read the message and record what the school did about it.

Offensive language is treated differently and is not a safeguarding referral. The student is asked to rephrase, is reminded that their teacher can see messages sent to the tutor, and a note is raised for the class teacher in the app. The safeguarding lead is not emailed.

Your safeguarding lead

A school using the AI tutor must give us the name and email address of its designated safeguarding lead, and keep those details current. This is the address our safeguarding alerts are sent to. If no safeguarding lead is recorded, the AI tutor will not answer your pupils. Everything else on the platform continues to work as normal. We do this deliberately: an alert with nowhere to go is not a safeguarding system, and we would rather your pupils had no tutor than a tutor whose alerts reach nobody.

What this is not

This is an automated check, not a monitoring service. No one at Smash Your Exams reads these messages as they are sent. The check can miss things and it can flag things that turn out to be nothing. It does not replace, reduce or discharge any part of the school's own safeguarding arrangements, and the school remains responsible for those in full.

8. Intellectual property

• The Service, the challenges, learning content, branding and software are owned by us (or our licensors) and are protected by intellectual-property laws. You get a limited, non-transferable licence to use them for learning or teaching while your account is active.
• You keep ownership of the code you write. By using the Service you grant us a licence to store and process your code as needed to operate the Service (e.g. to save it, run tests, and provide AI help).

9. Availability & "as is"

We work to keep the Service available and reliable, but we provide it "as is" and "as available". We don't guarantee it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that AI output will be accurate. We may carry out maintenance or change the Service from time to time.

10. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law (such as for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud). Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of data, or loss of profit, and our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the claim.

11. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of England & Wales, and the courts of England & Wales have jurisdiction, subject to any mandatory consumer-protection rights you have in your country of residence.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms as the Service evolves. We'll update the "Last updated" date and, for material changes, notify you and may require you to re-accept before continuing to use the Service. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

13. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Contact Smash Your Exams Education Ltd at support@smashyourexams.com, 42 Hampstead Close, Blyth, NE24 3XE.