Reviews Policy

Trusted Tutors is operated by Peter Hinett as a sole trader. Questions about this policy can be sent to support@trustedtutors.co.uk.

Two kinds of review

A tutor's profile may show two different kinds of review, and we're careful to keep them clearly separate:

  • Reviews collected directly through Trusted Tutors — submitted by a parent or student and shown on the tutor's profile.
  • Reviews from other platforms (for example Google Reviews or Trustpilot) that a Plus-membership tutor wants to display. We add these manually, on the tutor's behalf, having checked with the tutor that showing a particular review is appropriate and that any necessary permission has been obtained. Each one is clearly attributed to its original platform, and a "View source" link is only ever shown where we hold a genuine link to the original review. We do not fabricate a review, or change the wording or meaning of a genuine one, when adding it.

What our moderation does and doesn't do

Reviews collected directly by Trusted Tutors are moderated before they're published — we read each one to check it's genuine in tone and doesn't contain inappropriate, abusive or clearly fabricated content. This moderation process is a content check, not an independent identity-verification process: it does not, and cannot, confirm that the person who left a review was a genuine, independent student rather than, for example, a friend or family member of the tutor. We never describe our review moderation as "verified" or as independent authentication of a review's authenticity, and Trusted Tutors does not show a "Reviews Verified" badge for any tutor, at any time.

For reviews reproduced from another platform, we display what the tutor has told us was posted there. We do not independently re-verify the authenticity of reviews that originated on a third-party platform beyond what that platform itself already does.

Fictional or demonstration content

No review shown to a real visitor on the live site is fictional. Any example or placeholder reviews used while building or testing this site are kept in a development-only dataset and are never mixed with genuine tutor or review records shown to the public (see our Verification Policy for how this applies to tutor profiles generally).

Removing or disputing a review

If a tutor believes a review about them is fake, defamatory, or breaches this policy, they can ask us to look into it by emailing support@trustedtutors.co.uk. As with other complaints within our remit (see our Safeguarding and Reporting Concerns Policy), we aim to acknowledge this within five working days and give a substantive response within 15 working days.

We may temporarily hide a review while we look into a dispute, before reaching a decision, where the dispute says the review names or identifies a specific child or student, contains content that's abusive, threatening, or plainly defamatory on its face, or where the tutor gives a specific, checkable reason to think it isn't from a genuine student. A dispute that's simply "this review is unfair" or "this isn't true," without more, doesn't on its own take a review down while we look into it.

Once we've looked into it, we restore or leave up a review where no breach of this policy is found, and we permanently remove it where it's confirmed to name or identify a specific child or student, confirmed to be abusive, threatening or defamatory, found on reasonable grounds not to be a genuine student review, or (for a review reproduced from another platform) removed at source on that platform. This doesn't create a right to have an unfavourable-but-genuine review removed, and we don't guarantee a particular outcome.

Ratings shown in search results

Where a star rating or average is shown for a tutor, it is calculated only from that tutor's own genuine reviews actually on file — we do not invent, estimate or round up ratings or review counts, including in the page data used by search engines.