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Tutor notes

Private notes on a student — who else in your business can read and edit them, what a parent's data download does and does not contain, and how to export the lot.

The short version Open a student and scroll to Tutor notes. What you write there is never shown to that child or to their parent — not in the app, not on a printed report, not in the weekly email, and not in the data download a parent can take for themselves. It is visible to everyone else signed in to your business, and any of them can edit or delete it. Your name stays on it either way.

Writing a note about a student

Notes live on the student's own page in your console, below Groups. Type into the box and press Add note. The newest note sits at the top, and each one carries who wrote it and when.

A note holds up to 4,000 characters — a couple of paragraphs, not a lesson plan. There is one box and no categories to fill in, deliberately: the point is that you can get a thought down between lessons rather than file it.

The example the box suggests "Responds well to worked examples; still confusing mixed numbers with improper fractions." That is a note about the work in front of you and what helped — it tells you what to do next lesson. A note that only records a verdict on the child does not.

Notes are per student, never per group There is no notes panel on a group. Group screens deliberately only ever show a group-wide picture, so nothing you write about one child can surface in a view somebody opens for another reason.

Who else in your business can read and edit your notes

Everyone signed in to your business can read every note on every student they can see, and can edit or delete any of them — not only the ones they wrote themselves.

That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. If you are covering a colleague's students while they are away, notes you cannot correct are notes you cannot rely on. The boundary that is actually protecting anybody here is the one between your business and a parent, and that boundary does not move.

What keeps it honest is attribution. A note always shows the name of the person who wrote it, and once anyone changes it, Last edited by and their name appear underneath. The name is stored on the note itself, so it still reads correctly long after that person has stopped working with you.

Write as though a colleague is standing behind you There is no such thing as a note only you can see. If you would not be content for another tutor in your business to read a sentence over your shoulder, it does not belong in the box.

If you are the only person signed in to your business — which is the ordinary case, as there is no screen for adding a colleague to your account today — then in practice these notes are yours alone. The rules above are worth knowing before that changes, not after.

Editing or deleting a note somebody else wrote

Every note has Edit and Delete underneath it, whoever wrote it.

Edit opens the text for changing. Saving stamps your name on it as the last person to edit it; the original author's name stays where it is.
Delete asks you to confirm, then takes the note off the panel. It does not scrub it: a deleted note is still in the export described below, marked as deleted.

Deleting is kept recoverable on purpose. A note removed in a hurry is exactly the note somebody asks about six months later, and "we deleted it and cannot say what it said" is a worse answer than the note itself would have been.

Exporting every note you hold

At the bottom of the panel, Export all notes downloads every note ever written about that student as a plain text file. This button is only available to the owner of the business — a tutor signed in to somebody else's account will not see it.

The file contains, for each note in the order it was written:

The date and time	When the note was first written.
Who wrote it	The author's name, as it was at the time.
Deleted notes too	Marked (deleted) after the name.
The text	In full.

It is a text file, so it opens in anything and needs nothing from us to read. Use it when you are answering a formal request about a child, handing a student on to another tutor, or keeping a record outside the platform.

The panel shows the most recent hundred notes The export has no such limit. If you have been writing about the same child for years, the file is the complete record and the panel is the working view.

What a parent can and cannot see

A parent linked to a child gets their own portal, a weekly email, and a button that downloads their child's data. None of those contain notes. Neither does the printed report you produce from the student page.

The parent's own download says so, in words they read without having to ask you "This export covers practice history and progress only. It does not include a tutor's own private working notes — those belong to the tutor, the same way a teacher's would."

That sentence is the honest version of the position, and it is safe for you to repeat: the separation is built into how the data is stored, not into a setting somebody could switch off by accident.

What happens if a parent asks for their child to be deleted In a tutor business, that request does not delete anything. Nothing is removed, and the owner of the business gets an email saying it was made. There is no screen in the console for handling it — the email is the whole of it, and what to do next is your decision as the person responsible for that record. Read more in the parent's guide, which is what they will have read.

Writing a note knowing a parent could ask to see it

A parent cannot reach your notes through the product. They can still make a formal request in writing, and the law that governs that is not something the product decides. If it happens, the export is what you would be working from — and it names the author of every note, including the ones that were deleted.

So the test worth applying as you type is not "can anyone see this" but "would this sentence hold up if I had to read it out to the child's parent, with my name against it".

Two habits make that easy, and both make the notes better for teaching anyway:

Write about the work, not about the child

"Slipped on the last two questions of a timed set — worth trying a shorter set" is something you can act on and read aloud. A judgement about the child is neither.
Keep what you would say to their face

If a note would land badly read back, it is not a private note — it is a note you have not finished writing. Say what you saw and what you would try next.

Nothing here ever reaches the child Notes are structurally out of reach of the pupil app: there is no screen in it that can show one. Whatever you write, no ten-year-old is going to open Strivli and find an adult's assessment of them waiting on the screen.

Questions people ask

I signed up as a parent for my own child and there is no notes panel.: Correct — notes only exist in a tutor business. They are there to keep a tutor's working notes private from a parent, and when you are the parent there is nobody that protects you from, so the feature is switched off rather than left sitting there doing nothing.
Can I mark a note as important so it stays at the top?: Not from the panel today. Notes are listed newest first.
Do notes appear on a printed report?: No. The report is built from practice data only, and the copy on it is written to be handed to a parent or a child as it stands.
A tutor has left my business. What happens to their notes?: They stay where they are, still showing that person's name. Removing somebody's access does not remove what they wrote, and the name on the note stays readable so the record still makes sense.
What happens to notes when a student's record is removed?: They are deleted with it, permanently, including the deleted ones that were still in the export. Take the export first if you need to keep anything.
Can I get a deleted note back?: Not onto the panel — but the text is still in Export all notes, marked as deleted, and you can paste it back in as a new note.

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