Last updated: 12 August 2026
This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, what we do with it, and the rights you have over it. We have tried to write it in plain English. If anything here isn’t clear, email chris@ieltsadvantage.com and ask.
1. Who we are
Advantage Exam Preparation Limited (“IELTS Advantage”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy. That means we decide what information is collected and what happens to it.
Company: Advantage Exam Preparation Limited, registered in Northern Ireland, company number NI637423 Address: 4 Castleglen Park, Dundrum, County Down, BT33 0WL, United Kingdom Email: chris@ieltsadvantage.com
This policy is governed by the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018.
2. What this policy covers
This policy covers our website at ieltsadvantage.com, our courses and student accounts, our email lists, and our social media and advertising activity. It does not cover third-party websites we link to, which have their own policies.
3. The information we collect
3.1 Information you give us
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Name and email address | When you download a free guide, join a free course, subscribe to our emails, or create an account |
| Billing details, including address and country | When you purchase |
| Your previous IELTS scores, your target score, your test date and your reasons for taking IELTS | In the Diagnostic Intake Form when you enrol |
| Your circumstances, where you choose to tell us — for example work, study plans, health or family matters affecting your study | When you contact us or complete your roadmap |
| Your written work, including practice essays and assignments | When you submit work for feedback |
| Audio and video of you | During 1-to-1 lessons, mock speaking tests and testimonial recordings |
| Your official IELTS score reports, test booking confirmations and proof of payment | When you make a guarantee claim |
| The content of your emails and support messages to us | Whenever you contact us |
| Comments you post on our website | When you post them |
Card details. We do not see, handle or store your card number. Payments are processed directly by Stripe, and we receive only a confirmation, the last four digits and the card type.
3.2 Information we collect automatically
- How you use the course: which modules you have opened and completed, which sessions you have booked and attended, what work you have submitted, and when.
- How you use our website: pages viewed, navigation paths, time and duration of visits, referral source.
- Technical data: IP address, approximate location derived from it, browser type and version, device type, operating system.
- Email engagement: whether you opened an email and which links you clicked.
3.3 Information from other sources
- Stripe gives us payment confirmations, refund status and dispute notifications.
- YouTube, Meta and Google give us aggregated, non-identifying statistics about our channels and adverts.
- Where you claim a guarantee, we may verify a score report directly with the relevant IELTS testing authority.
4. Why we use your information, and our lawful basis
Under UK GDPR we must have a lawful basis for everything we do with your data. Here is ours, purpose by purpose.
| What we do | Information used | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Give you access to the course, deliver lessons, mark your writing and run your 1-to-1 sessions | Account, progress, submitted work | Contract — we need this to provide what you bought |
| Build and update your personal study roadmap | Diagnostic scores, target score, progress | Contract |
| Take payment, issue invoices and process refunds | Billing and transaction data | Contract |
| Answer your questions and provide support | Contact details, account, message content | Contract |
| Assess a refund or guarantee claim, including checking what you have told us against your course records | Usage and progress data, submitted work, claim evidence | Contract, and our legitimate interests in verifying claims and preventing fraudulent ones |
| Send you service messages — receipts, access details, session reminders, changes to terms | Contact details, account | Contract |
| Send you marketing emails about our courses | Name, email, engagement data | Consent, or our legitimate interests where you are an existing customer and we are telling you about similar services. You can opt out at any time |
| Show you our adverts on Google, YouTube, Meta and other platforms, and build similar-audience lists | Website activity, and in some cases a scrambled (hashed) version of your email address | Consent, given through our cookie banner |
| Understand how our website and emails perform | Usage data, engagement data | Consent for analytics cookies |
| Use a testimonial recording on our channels and in advertising | Video, audio, image, first name, score | Consent, which you may withdraw — see section 7 |
| Keep accounting and tax records | Transaction data | Legal obligation |
| Establish, exercise or defend legal claims, including responding to chargebacks | Whatever is relevant to the claim | Legitimate interests, and legal obligation where applicable |
| Keep our website and accounts secure and prevent fraud and abuse | Technical data, account activity | Legitimate interests in protecting our business and our students |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is overridden by your rights, and concluded it is not. You can ask us to explain that assessment, and you can object — see section 10.
5. Marketing, and how to stop it
Every marketing email we send has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and it works immediately. You can also email chris@ieltsadvantage.com and ask us to stop.
If you unsubscribe, we keep a minimal record of your email address on a suppression list. That is the only way to guarantee we don’t email you again by accident, and we rely on our legitimate interests to do it.
Unsubscribing from marketing does not stop service messages about a course you have bought — receipts, access details and session reminders are part of delivering what you paid for.
6. Cookies and similar technologies
We use cookies and similar technologies for three things: making the website work, understanding how it is used, and advertising.
- Essential cookies keep you logged in, remember what is in your basket, and secure the checkout. These do not need your consent because the site cannot work without them.
- Analytics cookies tell us which pages people visit and where they drop off.
- Advertising cookies and pixels, including those from Google and Meta, let us show you our adverts elsewhere and measure whether they worked.
You can control analytics and advertising cookies through your browser settings, which let you block or delete cookies from any site including ours. Every major browser publishes instructions for doing this. Blocking essential cookies will stop parts of the site and the course platform working.
We are in the process of adding a cookie preference banner, which will let you accept or reject analytics and advertising cookies directly and change your mind at any time. We will update this section when it is live.
7. Video, audio and testimonials
Some of what we do involves recording you, so we want to be specific about it.
1-to-1 lessons and mock speaking tests. These take place on Zoom. We may record them so your teacher can review your performance and give you feedback. Recordings are used for your tuition and are not published.
Testimonial recordings. Our Complete Success Reward asks you to record a conversation with us about how you prepared. If you take part, you are giving us permission to use that recording publicly — on our website, our YouTube channel, our social media, and in paid advertising, worldwide and without a time limit. We will tell you this clearly before you record, and your permission is recorded in writing.
You can withdraw that permission at any time by emailing chris@ieltsadvantage.com. We will stop using the recording in any new material and remove it from channels we control, normally within 30 days. We cannot recover copies that other people have already downloaded or shared, and we may keep one archived copy together with the record of your consent, so that we can show the recording was made and used lawfully.
Taking part is entirely optional. If you would rather not appear on camera, tell us — it does not affect your access to the course or any other guarantee.
8. Who we share your information with
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing.
We do share it with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contracts that require them to protect it and use it only on our instructions:
| Provider | What they do |
|---|---|
| Stripe | Payment processing, refunds and dispute handling |
| Kajabi | Course platform, student accounts, course delivery and some email |
| AWeber | Email lists and marketing emails |
| Zoom | 1-to-1 lessons, mock speaking tests and testimonial recordings |
| Google (including Analytics, Ads and YouTube) | Website analytics, advertising and video hosting |
| Meta | Advertising on Facebook and Instagram |
| Our analytics dashboard provider | Internal reporting on sales and course usage |
We also share information with:
- Our teachers and team, including freelance teachers who mark your written work and deliver your 1-to-1 sessions. They see only what they need in order to teach you.
- Our professional advisers — accountants, insurers and lawyers — where necessary.
- Regulators, courts or law enforcement, where the law requires it or where we need to establish or defend a legal claim.
- A buyer or prospective buyer, if we ever sell the business or part of it. Any buyer would be bound by this policy in respect of information collected before the sale.
9. Sending information outside the UK
We are a remote business. Our team, our freelance teachers and our service providers are based in a number of countries, and your information will be accessed from outside the UK.
The main countries involved are the United Kingdom, South Africa and the Philippines, where our team and contractors are located, and the United States, where most of our service providers are based. Some team members and contractors work from other countries from time to time.
Where information goes to a country the UK has not decided offers equivalent protection — which includes South Africa and the Philippines — we put an International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, in place before that happens. For transfers to the United States, we rely either on the provider’s certification under the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, or on the same transfer agreements.
You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a particular transfer by emailing chris@ieltsadvantage.com.
10. How long we keep your information
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, course records, progress and submitted work | 6 years after your course access ends |
| Transaction and accounting records | 6 years after the end of the relevant accounting period, as required by tax law |
| Guarantee and refund claim records, including the evidence you sent us | 6 years after the claim is resolved |
| Support and email correspondence | 6 years |
| Marketing list data, if you never became a customer | 3 years after you last opened, clicked or otherwise engaged |
| Unsubscribe and suppression records | Indefinitely — this is what stops us contacting you again |
| Lesson and mock test recordings | 12 months, unless you ask us to delete them sooner |
| Testimonial recordings, and the record of your consent | For as long as we use them, and afterwards a single archived copy with the consent record |
| Website analytics data | Up to 26 months |
Where we no longer need information, we delete it or irreversibly anonymise it. We may keep it longer than shown above if it is relevant to an ongoing legal claim or if the law requires us to.
11. Automated decisions
We generate your study roadmap automatically from the scores and progress information you give us. It is a recommendation about what to study and when — it does not make any decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you, and you can ask us to change it at any time.
Refund and guarantee claims are decided by a person, not a machine. We look at your course records as part of that, but the decision is always made by a member of our team, and you can ask for it to be reviewed.
We do not carry out any solely automated decision-making of the kind described in Article 22 of the UK GDPR.
12. Your rights
You have the following rights over your personal information. All of them are free to use, and we will respond within one month.
- Access — ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
- Rectification — have inaccurate information corrected, or incomplete information completed.
- Erasure — ask us to delete your information, where we no longer have a good reason to keep it.
- Restriction — ask us to pause what we are doing with your information while a question about it is resolved.
- Portability — receive the information you gave us in a machine-readable format, or have it sent to another provider.
- Objection — object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests. You can object to direct marketing at any time and we must stop, no questions asked.
- Withdraw consent — where we rely on your consent, you can take it back at any time. That does not affect anything we did lawfully beforehand.
To use any of these rights, email chris@ieltsadvantage.com.
We may ask you to confirm your identity before we act — normally just by replying from the email address on your account. We will not ask you for certified documents or charge you a fee. In the rare case that a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive, we may charge a reasonable administration fee or decline it, and we will explain why if we do.
If your request is complex, we may extend the one-month deadline by up to two further months. We will tell you within the first month if that happens, and why.
13. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first at chris@ieltsadvantage.com — we would rather fix it directly.
You also have the right to complain to the UK’s data protection regulator at any time:
Information Commissioner’s Office Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF Helpline: 0303 123 1113 ico.org.uk
If you live outside the UK, you may also be able to complain to the data protection authority where you live.
14. Security
We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information: encrypted connections across our website and course platform, access limited to team members who need it, and reputable providers for payments and course hosting.
No transmission over the internet is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You are responsible for keeping your account password confidential and for telling us promptly if you think your account has been accessed by someone else.
15. Children
Our courses are intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us their information, email us and we will delete it.
16. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it was last changed. Where a change materially affects how we use your information, we will tell you by email or through your account before it takes effect.
17. Contact us
Questions about this policy, or about your information:
Email: chris@ieltsadvantage.com Post: Advantage Exam Preparation Limited, 4 Castleglen Park, Dundrum, County Down, BT33 0WL, United Kingdom
