Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy governs the use of the MyOracy platform. It is incorporated into the Master Services Agreement between MyOracy Ltd and the institution, and applies to every person the institution admits to the platform, whether pupil, teacher, or administrator. Where the Master Services Agreement and this Policy differ, the Master Services Agreement prevails.

MyOracy is a platform for the practice of argument. A policy on acceptable use borrowed from a general communications product would defeat that purpose within a week, because almost every rule such a policy contains would prohibit something a debate requires. This Policy is therefore written around the activity it governs.

The institution remains responsible for its own users. It decides who is admitted, it holds the relationship with the pupil and the pupil's family, and its own behaviour, safeguarding, and acceptable use policies continue to apply alongside this one. Where the institution's rules are stricter than this Policy, the institution's rules govern its own users. Nothing here narrows them.

Competitive debate requires a pupil to argue a position they do not hold. A pupil assigned to oppose a motion on refugee resettlement, on assisted dying, or on the abolition of private education is required to make the strongest case against it that they can construct, and will be assessed on how well they do so. A pupil who softens that case out of discomfort is a pupil who has not learned the exercise. If this Policy treated the content of an argument as the test of its acceptability, the platform could not operate at all.

The test is therefore not what is argued. It is how, and against whom. An argument is directed at a proposition; abuse is directed at a person. A pupil may dismantle an opponent's case without restraint, may call it incoherent, unevidenced, or dishonest in its use of sources, and may do so forcefully. What they may not do is turn that force on the opponent as a person, or on any group as people rather than as the subject of a proposition.

The exception is a shield for the argument, not for the arguer. A pupil who says something cruel and then says it was the motion speaking has not moved inside it. The question staff should ask when reviewing a transcript is a simple one: was this addressed to a claim, or to a person.

Two further limits apply. The exception does not extend to speech that would be unlawful regardless of setting, and no debating frame makes it lawful. And it operates only within the educational purpose the institution has set. A session used for something other than debate or oracy practice is outside the exception entirely, because there is no argument for it to protect.

Motions may be written by pupils and staff. When they are, the text is entered by the user and stored with the debate it belongs to. It is user-entered content rather than content MyOracy supplies, and MyOracy does not review motions before a session runs. Topics used in the oracy section are different: those are drawn from a fixed library written and curated by MyOracy, and are not generated from any pupil data.

Judging whether a motion is suitable for a particular group of pupils is a judgement about those pupils, and the institution is the only party positioned to make it. Age, prior experience, and what individual pupils in the room have lived through are all relevant, and none of them are visible to us.

An online debate runs in a room supplied by our real-time communications provider, and the Adjudica engine joins that room as a participant. It holds the timings, calls speakers in order, enforces the format, and receives the audio in the same way any other participant does. Pupils and staff are told this before a session begins, and Section 10 makes that a duty on staff. In-person debates and solo oracy practice do not use a video room at all.

The platform assesses spoken performance. Everything it produces is worthless, and its record of a pupil's progress becomes actively misleading, if the speech assessed was not delivered by the pupil to whom it is attributed.

Adjudica AI reads the text transcript of what was said. That fact has a consequence worth stating explicitly, because pupils work it out quickly: anything a pupil says aloud reaches the assessing model as text. Instructions spoken to the assessor therefore land in the transcript alongside the argument, and are visible there to any member of staff who reads it.

Attempting to influence the assessment by any means other than the quality of the speech is prohibited. This is treated as an academic integrity matter and is reported to the institution rather than handled by us, because the consequence is the institution's to set.

Accounts are created by the institution and access runs through the institution's own identity provider. A person's access ends when the institution ends it. Accounts are personal and are not transferable between users, between year groups, or between institutions.

A debate is an unusually likely place for a disclosure. A pupil arguing a motion on domestic abuse, on mental health provision, or on the care system may reach for a personal example, and in doing so may disclose something about their own circumstances that they would not have written in an exercise book. This is a foreseeable property of the activity rather than an edge case, and the platform is built on the assumption that it will happen.

Transcripts are retained for a short window, set out in the Privacy Policy, precisely so that a concern raised during or shortly after a session can be reviewed against what was actually said. Where MyOracy becomes aware of content that raises a safeguarding or welfare concern, we escalate it to the institution's designated safeguarding lead.

A pupil who is worried about something they said, or about something another pupil said, should tell a member of staff at their school. Nothing in this Policy asks a pupil to raise it with MyOracy instead, and nothing in it requires a pupil to keep a concern to themselves while a review takes place.

The platform's position, stated in the Privacy Policy and relied on by every institution using it, is that no assessment output is determinative and that a member of staff stands between the model and any consequence for a pupil. That position holds only if staff actually occupy that place.

MyOracy does not monitor sessions in real time, does not listen to live audio for moderation purposes, and does not apply automated content scanning to transcripts as a matter of routine. Review is triggered by one of the events below.

Review is constrained by retention. Transcripts are deleted on the schedule set out in the Privacy Policy and audio is never written to disk at all, which means a concern raised after the window has closed cannot be reviewed against a record, because no record exists. Institutions should raise concerns promptly for that reason.

MyOracy's enforcement powers are deliberately narrow. The institution holds the relationship with the pupil, holds the disciplinary authority, and knows the circumstances. Our ordinary response to a breach of this Policy is therefore to escalate it to the institution and let the institution decide what happens to the pupil. We act directly on an account only where waiting would be unreasonable.

Measures are applied proportionately, and to the person responsible rather than to the cohort around them. A breach by one pupil is not a reason to withdraw a class's access. An institution that disagrees with a measure we have taken should raise it at the contact below, and we will review it.

This Policy is reviewed twice a year, in January and July, and is updated when the platform or the law changes in a way that affects it. Material changes, meaning those that alter what is permitted or add an obligation, are notified to institutions at least 30 days before they take effect. Clarifications that do not change the substance take effect on publication.

Institutions should bring any material change to the attention of their users before it takes effect, in the same way they brought this Policy to their attention in the first place.

This Policy takes effect in August 2026. Next scheduled review: January 2027.

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.