Developer and API Terms

1. Agreement and account authority

By activating a developer account, creating a key, accessing the API or MCP service, or purchasing a plan, you agree to these terms for yourself and, if applicable, the organisation you represent. You confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation. You must provide accurate account and billing information and keep account access secure.

2. The service

SchoolsNearMe provides a versioned, read-only interface to structured institutional school information for England, source and freshness metadata, and SchoolsNearMe-derived measures. Features, page sizes, key counts, request rates and period quotas depend on the selected plan. Coverage varies by source, school type, phase and reporting period. Null and suppressed fields do not mean zero.

The service is a research and data-integration tool. It does not determine school admission, guarantee a place, provide legal or financial advice, or replace verification with a school, the DfE, Ofsted or a local authority.

3. Licence to use API output

During an active plan, SchoolsNearMe grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access the service and use returned data in your internal systems and customer-facing products, subject to these terms and applicable source licences. You may cache results reasonably for product performance, but must refresh data often enough for your use case and preserve material source dates, suppression flags and qualification notes.

You may not resell access to the API, disclose or sublicense an API key, offer a substantially identical bulk school-data feed, remove required source attribution, evade technical limits, or use the service to reconstruct and redistribute the whole dataset unless a written Enterprise agreement permits it.

4. Source data, attribution and excluded material

Launch output may combine data made available by the Department for Education through GIAS and official statistics, structured Ofsted facts, and original SchoolsNearMe-derived measures. Where Open Government Licence v3.0 material is returned, you must comply with that licence and include an appropriate attribution such as: “Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0”, together with source identification appropriate to the product.

Ofsted logos and third-party material are not licensed. ISI material, fees, catchment geometries, AI-generated summaries and school-site-derived content are excluded from the launch commercial API unless later documentation or a written agreement expressly includes them. SchoolsNearMe-derived measures, schemas, documentation, software and branding remain SchoolsNearMe intellectual property and are licensed only under these terms.

5. Acceptable use

You must not use the service to break the law; infringe privacy, database, copyright or other rights; profile or make high-impact decisions about individual children; claim that derived scores are official government rankings; misrepresent historic Ofsted grades as current report-card outcomes; probe, disrupt or overload the service; bypass authentication, quotas or capability controls; introduce malicious code; or enable another party to do any of these things.

You are responsible for your end users, your product claims, and having a lawful basis for any personal data you combine with school data. You must promptly notify SchoolsNearMe of suspected key compromise or service vulnerability.

6. Keys and security

API keys are bearer credentials. Keep them server-side, restrict access on a need-to-know basis, never place them in URLs or public client code, and rotate them after suspected disclosure or personnel changes. SchoolsNearMe may revoke a key immediately where reasonably necessary to protect the service, data sources or users.

7. Plans, payment and cancellation

Self-serve paid plans are recurring monthly or annual subscriptions billed in advance by Stripe. Displayed prices are in pounds sterling and exclude VAT where applicable. The subscription renews automatically until cancelled. You can manage payment methods, invoices and cancellation in the Stripe Customer Portal. Unless required by law or stated in a written order, fees already paid are non-refundable.

Paid entitlement is granted only after verified payment events. A checkout confirmation page does not itself grant access. If payment becomes overdue, SchoolsNearMe may provide a short grace period, restrict paid capabilities, or return the account to free limits. Cancellation normally takes effect at the current paid period end. There are no automatic overage charges at launch: the service returns 429 when the quota is exhausted.

8. Availability, changes and support

The operational target for self-serve plans is 99.5% monthly availability, but it is not a contractual service-level agreement or service credit commitment. Maintenance, upstream source outages, security events and circumstances outside reasonable control may affect availability. Support level depends on plan.

Additive optional fields may be added to v1. Breaking field changes require a new version except where faster action is reasonably necessary for security, law, source licensing or data integrity. Self-serve deprecations normally receive at least six months’ notice. SchoolsNearMe may change plan features or prices prospectively with reasonable notice.

9. Data accuracy and warranty disclaimer

SchoolsNearMe takes reasonable care in processing source data but does not warrant that all data is complete, current, uninterrupted or error-free. Public bodies revise datasets and definitions; schools can change between releases; suppression and matching can create gaps. The service is supplied “as is” and “as available” to the fullest extent permitted by law. You must design your product to display uncertainty appropriately and verify high-consequence claims.

10. Liability

Nothing limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud or death or personal injury caused by negligence. Subject to that, SchoolsNearMe is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, data or anticipated savings, or decisions made from school data. SchoolsNearMe’s aggregate liability arising from the developer service in any 12-month period is limited to the fees you paid for that service in that period. The free plan is provided without monetary liability to the fullest extent permitted by law.

11. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the service and revoke keys at any time. SchoolsNearMe may suspend or terminate access for material breach, non-payment, security risk, unlawful use, source-licence risk or serious harm to the service. Where practical, we will give notice and an opportunity to cure. On termination, stop using keys and any output you are no longer entitled to retain; provisions on intellectual property, restrictions, liability and governing law survive.

12. Privacy and confidentiality

The Privacy Policy explains account, billing, support, security and usage-event processing. SchoolsNearMe does not sell personal data; it sells or licenses access to a non-personal institutional school dataset and related software service. Do not send personal data, confidential information or pupil information in API search parameters, key names or support request IDs.

13. Governing law and contact

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. A written Enterprise order takes precedence where it expressly conflicts with these online terms. Questions, notices and licensing requests may be sent to hello@schoolsnearme.ai.