Question 1

What is MindSprout?

Accepted Answer

A pastoral awareness tool that gives schools a calm, banded view of how their students are doing — based on a 60-second daily mobile check-in, with real-time safeguarding alerts and a whole-school dashboard.

Question 2

Who is it for?

Accepted Answer

Primary and secondary schools, multi-academy trusts and local authorities — used by form tutors, pastoral staff, designated safeguarding leads and senior leaders.

Question 3

What does MindSprout NOT do?

Accepted Answer

It does not diagnose, score, or label children, and it does not replace a counsellor, ELSA, CAMHS pathway or your safeguarding system.

Question 4

How long does a check-in take?

Accepted Answer

Most students finish in 60–90 seconds, on any phone or tablet — no app-store download required. One question at a time, large accessible buttons, mobile-first PWA shell.

Question 5

What ages does it support?

Accepted Answer

Years 1 to 13 (US grades 1–12), with age-appropriate language and emotion scales.

Question 6

Is participation voluntary?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A skipped check-in is recorded as 'no response' and is never penalised.

Question 7

What happens if a student closes the tab mid check-in?

Accepted Answer

Nothing is half-saved. Answers are only written when the student completes and submits — partial responses are discarded by design.

Question 8

Can a student check in anonymously?

Accepted Answer

Yes, if the school enables anonymous mode on a question set. The response is recorded without the student's name attached and surfaces in aggregate trends. If the response triggers a safeguarding flag, a school admin can choose to reveal the identity — every reveal is written to the audit log with the admin's name, the time, and the reason.

Question 9

Can a student see their own trends?

Accepted Answer

Yes. From the student app they can open a 'my trends' view showing the last 90 days of their own scores and band history. It's read-only, no comparisons to peers, and never shows staff notes.

Question 10

What does a school admin see?

Accepted Answer

Everything inside their school: the whole-school dashboard, individual student profile pages, every class, the full safeguarding queue, all teacher notes, reports, CSV exports, the audit log, the notifications bell, the system-health dashboard, and Settings.

Question 11

What does a teacher see?

Accepted Answer

Their classes and the pupils inside the year groups assigned to them. They do not see the school-wide dashboard, other teachers' notes, or Settings.

Question 12

What does a pastoral user see?

Accepted Answer

The same year-group-scoped view as a teacher, plus the safeguarding queue for pupils in those year groups. They can triage, assign and resolve flags, but cannot change school settings or staff roles.

Question 13

How are year-group permissions enforced?

Accepted Answer

Every non-admin read is checked against the staff member's assigned year groups. School admins bypass the check; everyone else needs an explicit assignment. Removing a year group revokes access immediately.

Question 14

What reports are available?

Accepted Answer

Weekly and monthly wellbeing trend reports broken down by year group, house or whole-school; a correlation heatmap showing which questions correlate with safeguarding flags; and a temporal heatmap showing when in the week or term flags spike. Every report can be exported to CSV, or printed to PDF from the browser for SLT meetings.

Question 15

Where do staff notifications come from?

Accepted Answer

An in-app notifications bell on every staff page surfaces new high-severity flags, assignments, and the daily digest. A daily digest job runs at 07:00 UTC summarising the previous 24 hours of activity and unresolved high-priority items, and posts it to school admins and pastoral staff.

Question 16

How do new staff join?

Accepted Answer

School admins issue a secure single-use invite link. Every link has an expiry, a usage cap, a role allow-list and can be revoked at any time. Students never use invite links — they sign in with a class code and PIN.

Question 17

Where do safeguarding flags go?

Accepted Answer

Into the school's safeguarding queue. Each flag is visible to the school admin and to the staff member it's assigned to; unassigned flags are visible to pastoral staff with access to that year group. Flags are never sent automatically to students or parents.

Question 18

What raises a flag?

Accepted Answer

A red-band response, the student selecting 'I need to talk to someone', two consecutive red responses, or a 25-point or greater drop versus the pupil's 7-day average. Each trigger is configurable in Settings.

Question 19

What about flags from anonymous check-ins?

Accepted Answer

Anonymous flags appear in the queue with the identity hidden. If a school admin judges the risk warrants it, they can 'reveal identity' — the reveal is audit-logged with the admin's name, timestamp and reason, and the student then appears on the flag like any other.

Question 20

How reliably do high-severity flag notifications get delivered?

Accepted Answer

Every high-severity flag is queued for staff notification. A background worker retries failed dispatches with exponential backoff, and anything that fails five times is parked in a dead-letter queue surfaced on the system-health dashboard so an admin can investigate or retry manually.

Question 21

Does it replace our safeguarding system?

Accepted Answer

No. MindSprout sits before safeguarding — surfacing who might need a conversation. Concerns are logged in CPOMS, MyConcern or your existing system as normal.

Question 22

How are student PINs stored?

Accepted Answer

As salted SHA-256 hashes. Plaintext PINs are never written to the database — not even support staff can read them. PINs can be re-issued by any teacher at any time.

Question 23

Is the student login rate-limited?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A sliding-window limit allows 10 sign-in attempts per name per 5 minutes and 30 attempts per IP per 5 minutes. Five failed PIN attempts on the same student lock that PIN for 15 minutes; the lockout is recorded in the audit log and shown on the system-health dashboard. Check-in submission and the 'my trends' view are also rate-limited.

Question 24

How is one school's data isolated from another's?

Accepted Answer

Row-level security at the database. Every school-scoped table carries a school_id and every read filter is scoped to the caller's current school. There is no policy path that returns rows from a school the caller doesn't belong to — including for us.

Question 25

What's in the audit log?

Accepted Answer

Sensitive actions: viewing a pupil profile, exporting CSV, changing a role, issuing or revoking an invite link, resolving a flag, revealing an anonymous identity, PIN lockouts, editing question sets or band thresholds, and any cross-school support action by MindSprout. School admins can review the log at any time and export it to CSV (filterable by date range and action).

Question 26

Do CSV exports honour the same rules as the screen?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A teacher's CSV contains only their year groups; a school admin's CSV contains only their school. Every export is written to the audit log (who, filters, when).

Question 27

What if a staff member works at two schools?

Accepted Answer

They see each school's data only when that school is their active school. Switching schools changes the scope; nothing leaks across.

Question 28

Will you train AI on our students' data?

Accepted Answer

No. Student responses are never used to train any model — ours or a third party's.

Question 29

Where is the data stored?

Accepted Answer

On managed infrastructure in the UK or US, depending on your network's requirements.

Question 30

Is it GDPR-compliant?

Accepted Answer

Yes — a Data Processing Agreement and DPIA template are available on request.

Question 31

Do students need an email account?

Accepted Answer

No. Students sign in with a class code and a 4-digit PIN given by their teacher.

Question 32

Is there a free trial?

Accepted Answer

Yes — a free 30-day pilot with no card required. Run it across one form group, one year group, or the whole school.

Question 33

How does pricing work?

Accepted Answer

Per-pupil, per-year, billed annually. Founding-school price from 83p per pupil for the first year. See the pricing page for details or get in touch for a tailored quote.

Question 34

How long does rollout take?

Accepted Answer

Register, invite staff with secure single-use links, import classes, send your first check-in — under 10 minutes for a single class, under a week for a whole school.

The basics, in plain English.

About MindSprout

How students use it

Dashboards & roles

Safeguarding

Security & data

Privacy

Getting started

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