Privacy notice

Benchpoint, an ordinary partnership operated by Paddy McGrath and Dan Fitzpatrick, is the controller of the personal information described in this notice.

Write to us at Ground Floor, Gallery Building, 65–69 Dublin Road, Belfast, BT2 7HG, or email privacy@benchpoint.ai.

For the Proof Gap Check, we require your name, work email, school or school group, nine readiness answers, any required evidence follow-ups, and your school setting, role, 90-day goal, main obstacle and preferred help. The final free-text answer and marketing choice are optional. Without the required information we cannot complete and save your Check.

For a Founding 50 application, we require your name, work email, school or school group, role, country or territory, school setting, AI maturity and your written question about AI. The people you expect to show a result to and marketing choice are optional. Without the required information we cannot assess your application.

We store the submitted responses, calculated Check results, submission dates, application status and relevant review or outcome dates. We also record marketing choices, their wording and version, source and time, and withdrawals. A limited campaign or source tag may accompany a submitted form; we do not need it to provide the Check or consider an application.

We do not request pupil data. Do not include identifiable or sensitive information about pupils, staff or anyone else in free-text answers.

Providing the requested Check and keeping its result accessible: legitimate interests in giving school leaders an indicative view of their self-reported readiness and evidence gaps. We limit the information collected and keep shared results separate from contact details.

Reviewing applications, contacting applicants and managing a reserve list: legitimate interests in selecting and organising the Founding 50 fairly and responding to people who ask to take part. Selection is reviewed by people, not decided by the Check score.

Improving the service and developing the assessment: legitimate interests in understanding leaders’ needs and reviewing our questions and recommendations. Identifiable responses may be reviewed internally for these purposes, with restricted administrator access. This is separate from promotional email consent.

Protecting the service: legitimate interests in preventing abuse, investigating faults and keeping submissions secure. Temporary rate limits and minimised technical logs support this.

Optional promotional emails: your consent to Founding 50 news, Benchpoint product news, research and offers. You can decline without losing access to the Check or affecting your application. Consent to these emails is not permission for unrelated research or AI training.

Website measurement: with your consent, we use Google Analytics to understand website usage and improve the site. Google Analytics runs only if you accept it. Analytics permission is separate from permission to receive marketing emails.

We do not send submitted answers to an AI service for scoring or training. We do not publish identifiable responses, quotations or case studies without separate permission. Any published research or benchmark findings must be genuinely anonymised, including checks for small groups, distinctive answers and the risk of identifying a school or person.

You can object to uses based on legitimate interests by emailing privacy@benchpoint.ai. We will consider your circumstances and whether there are overriding grounds to continue.

Submitting the completed Founding 50 form is an application, not a purchase or a confirmed place. You request the administrative emails needed to handle it: acknowledgement, questions, outcomes, reserve-list updates and participation arrangements where relevant. These communications must stay relevant to the application.

An application, reserve-list membership or completed Check does not subscribe you to marketing. The optional checkbox is separate and unticked by default. Completing the Check is not a Founding 50 application.

Unsubscribe using the link in a marketing email or contact privacy@benchpoint.ai. Withdrawal does not affect earlier lawful processing. We preserve objections and unsubscribe records rather than treating a later form submission as permission to reactivate a suppressed subscription.

Anyone possessing the result link can view the intended scores, domain findings and priorities without signing in. These results are not inherently anonymous: their content may reveal information about your school even though names, emails, school names and free text are not returned by the public result service.

Keep the link private unless you intend to share it. It expires 12 months after submission. To request earlier revocation or deletion, email privacy@benchpoint.ai. Revoking a link prevents further access through that link; it cannot recall copies that someone has already saved or printed.

Scoring is calculated automatically from self-declared answers. It is indicative, not verification, inspection or a comparison with other schools. No evidence documents are uploaded or independently checked.

Authorised Benchpoint administrators can access submissions. Replit provides application hosting; submissions are held in the PostgreSQL database connected to the application. MailerLite is our optional marketing-email provider. New marketing synchronisation is restricted to approved consented contacts and does not send questionnaire responses, evidence answers or free text.

The permitted marketing-sync payload is email address, name and school or organisation, with membership of an approved marketing-only group. Consent evidence and application status are recorded separately in our database.

We use email services to deliver communications, including automated emails. Necessary application communications are separate from optional marketing: applying does not by itself give permission to receive marketing emails.

Email and hosting services can involve processing outside the UK. Contact privacy@benchpoint.ai for current provider, processing-location and international-transfer details. This notice does not claim that data is hosted only in the UK.

We use Google Analytics, a service provided by Google, to understand how visitors find and use our website and to improve its content and usability. With your consent, it can process information about public pages visited, interactions, referral and campaign sources, approximate location, browser and device characteristics, and online identifiers.

Google Analytics runs only after you choose Accept in the cookie banner. Choosing Decline disables Analytics and removes its cookies from this site. We remember your choice in your browser's local storage. You can reopen the banner using Cookie settings in the website footer and change your choice.

We exclude results, verification and administration pages from Google Analytics tracking. Page addresses sent to Analytics retain only permitted campaign tags in their query strings, not result identifiers.

Advertising features and Google Signals are switched off. Our Google Analytics retention setting for detailed event data is two months. This is separate from the retention periods for Check results and applications and does not mean that all Google-held information or aggregated reports are deleted after two months.

Analytics information is not necessarily anonymous. Google may process information outside the UK. See https://policies.google.com/privacy and https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites for information about Google's processing.

Analytics is not needed to calculate your Check or assess your application. You can use your browser's privacy settings to block or remove analytics cookies. Google also provides an opt-out browser add-on at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. These controls are separate from unsubscribing from Benchpoint emails.

Proof Gap Check: the complete submission, contact details, raw answers and calculated result are retained for 12 months from submission, then removed from the active database. The shared link stops working at expiry or earlier revocation.

Pending applications: we review them after six months. They are closed unless pending status is explicitly renewed for a justified, recorded period, with notification as appropriate. Renewal is not automatic.

Unsuccessful applications: application and reserve-list data are retained for six months after the outcome, then deleted, unless a separately documented legal requirement applies.

Successful participants: detailed questionnaires and related participation records are retained during the engagement and for 12 months after it ends. Necessary financial or contractual records may have a separate retention requirement; they are not used to justify retaining detailed questionnaire answers.

Marketing records are separate from Check and application schedules. We review inactivity after 24 months without a recorded meaningful engagement or renewed request, rather than relying on email opens alone, and pause marketing eligibility unless a renewed need or permission is established. Withdrawal stops marketing eligibility immediately.

Minimum consent evidence is retained for three years after the relevant processing ends or consent is withdrawn, whichever is later. We retain minimum suppression information separately for as long as needed to respect your choice, rather than preserving questionnaire answers for that purpose.

Earlier first-party journey-event records are deleted within 90 days. Our policy for routine technical logs is 30 days where the processing provider supports it; selected incident evidence may be retained for a documented investigation. This first-party event period is not Google's Analytics retention setting.

Deletion from our active systems is separate from expiry of provider backups. Recovery copies are not necessarily erased immediately when an active record is deleted. Contact privacy@benchpoint.ai about a deletion request, any outstanding provider processing and relevant backup arrangements. Copies already downloaded by you or another recipient cannot be remotely recalled.

The forms hold unfinished answers in browser memory. Immediate result personalisation also uses browser memory and disappears on reload. We have stopped using browser session storage for our own campaign journeys and stopped collecting new events through our previous first-party visit, start and answer system. This does not mean Google Analytics is disabled; its processing is described separately above. Older first-party event records may contain event type, question identifier, headline variant, campaign/source tags and date; they are not treated as fully anonymous.

A valid source or campaign tag in a submitted form may be kept with that submission to understand where the request came from. This form attribution is separate from Google Analytics, which can also process referral and campaign information.

We self-host the site’s fonts. Technical request logs are minimised to avoid form bodies, contact information and result tokens. Rate limiting temporarily processes IP addresses in server memory; entries expire and are swept within approximately 16 minutes. Hosting infrastructure may also process network and access information.

You may object to campaign/source processing or earlier service-analytics processing by emailing privacy@benchpoint.ai. No optional journey tracking is required to use these forms.

Depending on the circumstances, you may request access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection or portability of your personal information. Portability applies only where its legal conditions are met. We may need to verify your identity and explain any lawful limits on a request.

Contact privacy@benchpoint.ai to exercise a right, withdraw marketing consent, request result-link revocation or ask about this notice.

You may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/.