Child Safety / Online Safety

1. Our commitment

We are committed to providing a service where students can practise and learn safely. Mentor is a study tool that operates alongside a school’s own child safety and pastoral care procedures — it is not a replacement for them, and school staff remain responsible for the wellbeing of their students while Mentor is used in a school context.

2. How a student gets an account

A student cannot create their own Mentor account. A student account is always provisioned first by a school administrator or teacher, using a school-assigned student number and a school email address, and the student signs in using that school’s own Google identity system. This means every student account is tied to an identity the school itself controls and can revoke at any time.

Mentor also offers an anonymous Practice feature that anyone can use without an account — see our Terms of Service for how age and consent apply to that feature.

3. How the AI Mentor is designed to reduce risk

The AI Mentor (our “Help Me Understand” feature) includes several automated controls:

• Topic gating. It is instructed to stay focused on the current question and not engage as a general-purpose chatbot.
• Off-topic and prompt-injection detection. Messages that look like an attempt to redirect the AI away from its instructions, or that are clearly unrelated to the question, are met with a fixed redirect rather than a full AI response.
• Safeguarding disclosure detection. Messages containing language that may indicate self-harm, suicidal thoughts, abuse, or bullying are detected and handled as described in section 4, instead of receiving a normal AI response.
• An answer-leak guard. A separate, non-AI check blocks the AI Mentor from simply stating the correct answer to a question.
• Conversation and rate limits. A conversation with the AI Mentor is capped in length, and requests are rate-limited, to reduce both misuse and excessive dependence on the tool.

Full technical detail on how these controls work is in our AI Use & Limitations statement.

4. What happens when a message is flagged

If a student’s message is detected as a possible safeguarding concern:

1. the student is shown a fixed, supportive response encouraging them to talk to a trusted adult — the AI does not attempt to counsel the student or continue the conversation as if nothing happened;
2. an automated email alert is sent to the student’s teacher, where we can identify one from the student’s class enrolment, or otherwise to a fallback contact at the school or Vividex; and
3. the flagged message is logged so the alert can be checked and followed up.

This is a real, working alert pathway — it has been tested and does send an email in practice — but it depends on a human reading and acting on that email. It is not a 24-hour monitored service.

5. Limitations — please read this section

The detection described above is automated and pattern-based. It is not a clinical or professional safeguarding assessment, and it is not perfect:

• it can miss a genuine disclosure phrased in a way it doesn’t recognise;
• it can occasionally flag a message that isn’t actually a safeguarding concern;
• it only examines messages sent to the AI Mentor — it does not monitor anything else a student does on or off the Service; and
• it is not a substitute for a school’s existing child protection procedures, and it is not a crisis or counselling service.

If a student is in immediate danger, call emergency services on 000. For confidential support, students and young people can also contact Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 (free, 24/7, for anyone aged 5–25), and anyone can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 (24/7). These services are independent of Mentor.

6. Who can access student information

Access to student information within Mentor is restricted by role: a teacher can see their own students’ progress, not another teacher’s or another school’s; a school administrator can see roster information for their own school; and general AI Mentor conversations are not stored or visible to teachers at all, except for a message that has been flagged under section 4. As our team grows, anyone who joins Vividex with access to student information will be expected to hold a current Working with Children Check (or equivalent for their location) appropriate to their role, and to only access student information where genuinely necessary to run or support the Service.

7. Reporting a concern

If you have a child safety concern about Mentor itself — not a specific student disclosure, which is handled as described in section 4 — contact us at support@learnwithmentor.com.au. If the concern involves a specific school, please also raise it with that school directly, as they remain the primary point of contact for the safety of their students.