Terms and conditions

1. About these terms

These terms apply to your use of www.awakeconsultancy.com (our “website”), the Awake member portal (the “portal”) and the membership and services we provide through them (together, our “services”). By creating an account, becoming a member or otherwise using our services, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use our services.

If you create an account or buy a membership for a childcare setting, you confirm that you are authorised to accept these terms on the setting’s behalf; in that case “you” includes the setting. Our privacy notice explains how we use personal data and forms part of these terms.

Our recruitment services and any consultancy work agreed outside the portal (for example, a quoted project, a mock inspection or support on site) are provided under the separate written terms we agree with you for that work. If those terms conflict with these, the separate terms apply to that work.

2. Who we are

Our services are provided by Awake Early Years Consultancy Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 10553481, whose registered office is at Flat 1 Boulevard Point, 15 Scarbrook Road, Croydon, England, CR0 1LY. You can contact us at info@awakeconsultancy.com or by post at 84 Turnpike Link, Croydon, CR0 5NY.

We are an independent consultancy. We are not part of, or endorsed by, Ofsted, the Department for Education or any local authority.

3. Using our website

The information on our public website, including our blog and articles, is general information about early years practice. It is not professional or legal advice for your particular circumstances, and you should not rely on it as such. We make reasonable efforts to keep it accurate and up to date, but guidance and legislation change, so please check current statutory guidance before acting on it.

Our website may link to other websites. We are not responsible for their content or how they handle your information.

4. Your account

• You must be at least 18 years old and use the portal for a childcare setting in the UK — including one you are setting up — or as an adult working in early years.
• The information you give us must be accurate, and you must keep it up to date.
• Each person must use their own account. Keep your sign-in details secure, do not share them, and tell us straight away at info@awakeconsultancy.com if you think someone else has used your account.
• A setting’s account owner manages its membership and payments and is responsible for the people they give access to. You are responsible for what happens under your account, unless it happens because of our failure to keep our systems secure.

5. Membership

Membership gives your setting access to the member benefits described on our website for the plan you choose at the time you join — for example our resource library, policy templates, the AI policy writer, the Awake Health Check, “Ask the Awake Man”, our newsletter, webinars and consultancy requests. Plans are for a particular type of setting (for example, childminders or day nurseries), and you must choose the plan that matches your setting.

We may improve, update or replace individual resources and features during your membership. If we make a change that significantly reduces what your plan includes, we will tell you in advance and you may end your membership and receive a refund for the unused part of your current membership period.

We may, at our discretion, give a setting a complimentary membership without payment. It gives the same access as the plan we give, for the period we tell you, and we may change or end it at any time. When it ends, you can continue by choosing a paid plan.

6. Payment and renewal

• Prices are shown on our website and at checkout in pounds sterling. Where VAT applies, it is shown at checkout and on your invoice.
• Payments are processed securely by our payment provider, Stripe. By paying, you also agree to Stripe’s terms. We do not receive or store your full card details.
• Your membership renews automatically at the end of each membership period (for example, every year for an annual plan) and the renewal payment is taken using your saved payment method, unless you cancel before the renewal date (see section 7).
• If we change the price of your plan, we will tell you at least 30 days before the new price applies to you, so that you can cancel before your next renewal if you wish.
• If you change plan during a membership period, the price difference is worked out in proportion to the time remaining, and any amount due or credit appears on your invoice.
• If a payment fails, we will let you know and our payment provider will try again. Your access may continue for a short time while you update your payment details, but we may pause or end your membership if payment is not made.

7. Cancelling and refunds

• You can cancel at any time from Membership & billing in the portal. Your membership then ends at the end of the period you have already paid for: you keep full access until then, it will not renew, and you will not be charged again.
• Because you keep access until the end of the period, we do not refund payments for part of a membership period, except where these terms say otherwise or the law requires.
• If you are a consumer (joining mainly for purposes outside your trade, business or profession), you can also cancel within 14 days of joining and we will refund you in full. To do this, email us at info@awakeconsultancy.com within that time.
• If we end your membership for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund the unused part of any fees you have paid in advance.

Nothing in these terms affects your legal rights.

8. Using member services

Resources and policy templates

While you are a member, you may download, print and use our resources within your own setting, and adapt our policy templates for your setting. Policies you have adapted and adopted for your own setting remain yours to use after your membership ends. You must not sell, publish, share or redistribute our resources outside your setting, or use them to provide services to others.

The AI policy writer

Drafts produced by the AI policy writer are generated automatically and may contain mistakes, out-of-date information or wording that does not fit your setting. They are a starting point only and are not legal or professional advice.

• You are responsible for reading, checking and adapting every draft before you adopt it, including against the current EYFS statutory framework, other legislation and your local safeguarding partnership’s procedures.
• Do not enter names or other personal details of children, families or staff — the writer does not need them.
• What you enter is processed by Google’s Gemini service to produce the draft, as our privacy notice explains.
• To keep the service fair and available, we limit how many drafts each account can create each day, and we may temporarily withdraw the writer if it is misused or unavailable.

The Awake Health Check and action plans

The Health Check is a self-assessment tool based on your own answers. Its scores, results and suggested actions are intended to help you reflect and plan. They are not an Ofsted inspection, judgement or prediction of any inspection outcome. You remain responsible for your setting’s compliance with the law and statutory guidance.

The Awake Quality Mark

Where it is offered, we award the Awake Quality Mark at our discretion against the criteria we publish at the time you apply. A Quality Mark is valid for the period shown on it. You may display it only while it is valid and only in the form we provide, and you must not suggest that it is awarded or endorsed by Ofsted or any other body. We may suspend or withdraw a Quality Mark if the criteria are no longer met, if information given to us was inaccurate, or if the mark is misused.

Consultancy requests

You can ask us for consultancy support through the portal. We will confirm what we can help with, when and — if the work is not included in your plan — the cost before we start. We provide consultancy with reasonable care and skill, but decisions about how you run your setting remain yours.

Training and webinars

Places are allocated in the order bookings are made and may be limited. We may need to change the date, time, format or presenter of a session, or cancel it; if we do, we will tell you as soon as we can. Joining links and materials are for the people booked on the session and must not be shared.

“Ask the Awake Man”

Answers in our members’ community give general guidance based on the information in the question. They are not advice tailored to your full circumstances. Questions you post anonymously are shown to other members without your name, but our team can see who posted them. We may moderate, hide or remove posts that break these terms.

The community is not for urgent concerns. If a child is at immediate risk of harm, call 999. For other safeguarding concerns, follow your setting’s safeguarding procedures and contact your local authority children’s services or local authority designated officer (LADO).

9. Your content and other people’s data

You keep ownership of the content you add to the portal, such as Health Check answers, evidence, messages, posts and drafts (“your content”). You give us permission to store, copy and use your content as needed to provide our services to you, and to show your community posts to other members as described above.

You are responsible for your content. You confirm that you have the right to share it, that it is accurate to the best of your knowledge, and that it does not break the law or anyone else’s rights. If your content includes personal data about other people — such as your staff, children or families — you must have a lawful basis for sharing it with us and must have told those people, as data protection law requires. Please share such information only when it is genuinely necessary for the service you are asking for. We use it only to provide that service, as an independent controller, in line with our privacy notice.

10. Acceptable use

You must not:

• use our services for anything unlawful, fraudulent or harmful;
• post or upload anything abusive, defamatory, discriminatory, obscene or misleading, or that infringes anyone’s rights;
• share your sign-in details, or access an account, setting or information that is not yours;
• upload viruses or harmful code, try to get round our security, overload our systems, or use automated tools to copy, scrape or download our content;
• copy, adapt or reverse-engineer our website or portal, except as the law allows; or
• misuse the AI policy writer, for example to create content unrelated to running your setting.

11. Intellectual property

We, or the people who license material to us, own all intellectual property rights in our website, portal, resources, templates, training materials, articles, the Awake Health Check and the Awake Quality Mark, including their names and logos. Apart from the permissions given in these terms, you have no right to use them.

12. Availability and changes

We aim to keep our services available at all times, but we cannot promise they will always be uninterrupted or error-free. We may need to suspend them for maintenance, security or reasons outside our control, and we will try to give notice of planned work. We may update or change our services, for example to reflect changes in the law or guidance, or to improve them.

13. Suspending or ending an account

You can ask us to close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account, or end a membership, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if payment is not made, if we reasonably suspect fraud or misuse, or if we must do so by law. Where it is reasonable, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put things right.

When an account is closed, access to the portal ends and we deal with your information as our privacy notice describes. Please download anything you want to keep before then.

14. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be limited or excluded by law. If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your legal rights.

Subject to that:

• we are not responsible for losses that were not foreseeable when you agreed to these terms, or for any loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, goodwill or anticipated savings;
• we are not responsible for the outcome of any inspection, regulatory action or decision by Ofsted or any other body, or for decisions you make based on our resources, templates, Health Check results, AI policy writer drafts or general guidance, which you remain responsible for checking and applying to your setting;
• we are not responsible for problems caused by services we do not control, such as your internet connection, or the payment and AI services of other providers, where we have taken reasonable care in choosing and using them; and
• our total liability to you in connection with our services in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us for the services in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or £100 if you have not paid us anything.

15. Events outside our control

We are not responsible for any delay or failure to provide our services caused by events outside our reasonable control, such as the failure of a third-party service, a cyber attack, power or internet failure, severe weather, or industrial action. If this happens, we will tell you and do what we reasonably can to limit the effect.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example to reflect changes to our services or the law. The date at the top shows when they were last updated. If we make a change that significantly affects members, we will tell you by email or in the portal at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not agree with the change, you may end your membership before it takes effect; if the change is significantly to your disadvantage, we will refund the unused part of any fees you have paid in advance. If you continue to use our services after the change takes effect, the updated terms will apply.

17. Complaints

If you are unhappy with our services, please email info@awakeconsultancy.com and tell us what happened and what you would like us to do. We will acknowledge your complaint, look into it and aim to resolve it as quickly as possible.

18. General

• These terms, our privacy notice and any separate terms we agree with you for particular work are the whole agreement between you and us about our services.
• We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation, for example if our business is sold, and we will tell you if this happens. You may only transfer yours with our written agreement.
• If a court decides that part of these terms is not valid, the rest will still apply.
• If we delay or do not enforce any of these terms, we can still enforce them later.
• Only you and we have rights under these terms; no one else can enforce them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
• We may send you notices about these terms by email to the address on your account.

19. Law and courts

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in your local courts.