Terms of Service

OxMenti introduces secondary-school students to current University of Oxford students for 1-on-1 online tutoring, and handles the booking, the payment and the video room.

What we are not is the tutor. Tutors are independent — they set their own rates, choose their own availability, decide which requests to accept, and teach the session their own way. We check that they are genuinely at Oxford and we take a fee for running the platform; we do not employ them and we do not direct what happens in your session.

By using the site you agree to what follows. If you do not, please do not use it.

• You need an account to book. Sign in with Google or with an email link — either way, one person, one account.
• Everything you tell us should be true, particularly your name and your age band. A tutor preparing for a 15-year-old prepares differently.
• Keep your sign-in to yourself. Anything done from your account we will treat as done by you.
• New accounts are students by default. Becoming a tutor requires applying and being approved — see below.

Booking runs in a fixed order, and it matters where the money moves:

• You pick a slot from a tutor's availability. That creates a request. Nothing is charged.
• The tutor accepts or declines. A published slot is an offer to be asked, not a promise to teach — a tutor is allowed to decline, and declining costs you nothing.
• When they accept, the session price comes out of your wallet and the booking is confirmed. If your balance will not cover it, the acceptance fails, nothing is taken, and the request waits until you top up.
• On confirmation we create a video room for that session, email you both the link, and post it into your message thread.
• After the session, we mark it complete and invite you to leave a review.

Sessions run for the length shown when you book. Times are stored in UTC and shown to each of you in your own timezone, with the zone printed next to them — if a time ever looks wrong, check the label before you assume you have missed something.

• Everything on OxMenti is priced in pounds sterling. If your card is in euros, your bank converts it at checkout — we never apply an exchange rate of our own.
• Money you add becomes wallet credit, which buys sessions on OxMenti. It is not a bank deposit, it earns no interest, and it cannot be transferred to someone else.
• Booking deducts from the balance; a refund goes back to it. Every movement is listed in your dashboard.
• Top-ups are handled by Stripe. We never see your card number.

If you want money back rather than credit — because you have changed your mind about using OxMenti at all — email us. Your statutory right to cancel a distance purchase within 14 days is not affected by anything on this page, and we will return unspent credit to the card that paid for it.

A package is a bundle of sessions bought upfront. It costs less than the sessions would individually: you pay the package price, and your wallet is credited the full value of the sessions it contains, so the difference is the discount.

Package credit is ordinary wallet credit once it lands — it does not expire, it is not tied to a particular tutor or subject, and it is refundable on the same terms as anything else in your wallet. Packages available and their prices can change; the ones on offer when you buy are the ones you get.

You can cancel a confirmed session and get the full price back as wallet credit up to 24 hours before it starts. Inside 24 hours it can no longer be cancelled — by then your tutor has prepared for it and turned down other work for that slot.

• If a tutor cancels on you, you get the full amount back regardless of timing.
• If a tutor does not turn up, tell us and we will refund you.
• If technology fails badly enough that the session cannot happen, tell us — we would rather sort it out than argue about whose connection dropped.

• You must be a current University of Oxford student. We ask for your college and a photograph of your student ID, and an admin checks it before your profile goes live.
• You set your hourly rate. From each completed session you receive your rate minus OxMenti's platform fee, which is shown to you during onboarding.
• You are paid after the session is complete, not when you accept it — through Stripe, into the account you connect. Nothing is transferred to you before you have taught.
• You are self-employed. Your tax and national insurance are yours to handle; we are not your employer.
• Keep your availability honest. It is the one thing students plan around.
• We can deactivate a profile that no longer meets the standard — including after graduation, since the whole promise is that your tutor recently sat your exam.

Most of our students are under 18. This section is not boilerplate and we enforce it.

• Every tutor is identity-checked against their Oxford student ID before teaching.
• Sessions take place in a video room created for that booking, and messages stay in the platform. Moving a student onto a personal number, a private call or another service is not allowed — it removes every protection either of you has.
• We do not record sessions.
• Contact between a tutor and a student should be about the tutoring. Anything else — meeting in person, contact outside the platform, anything of a personal nature — is a breach of these terms and ends the account.
• If a student is under the age of digital consent where they live (13 in the UK, 14 in Spain, 16 in Germany), a parent or guardian must set up and oversee the account.

If anything makes you uncomfortable, tell us at team.oxmenti@outlook.com. We would far rather hear about something that turns out to be nothing.

Do not use OxMenti to:

• Harass, abuse or discriminate against anyone.
• Get someone else to sit your exam, or produce work you will submit as your own. Tutoring helps you understand the subject; it does not do the assessment for you.
• Arrange payment outside the platform to avoid the fee — it removes the refund and safeguarding protections that fee pays for.
• Upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to share.
• Scrape, break into, or otherwise attack the site.

We can suspend or close an account that does any of this, without notice if it is serious.

• Work you upload stays yours. You give us permission to store it and show it to your tutor, and nothing more.
• Preparation material a tutor writes stays theirs.
• The OxMenti name, logo, site and content are ours.
• A review you write stays yours, but you let us display it on the site. We remove reviews that are abusive or untrue, not reviews that are unflattering.

We do not promise particular grades. Tutoring is help with understanding a subject; the exam is still yours to sit. Anyone in this market promising you a grade is selling something they cannot deliver.

We do not promise the site is always available, though we try. We are responsible for getting our own side right — bookings, payments and the platform itself — and not for what an independent tutor does in a session, beyond removing them if they behave badly. Nothing here limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit, including for death, personal injury, or fraud.

Close your account whenever you like, by emailing us. Sessions already confirmed still happen unless you cancel them, and unspent wallet credit comes back to you. We may close an account that breaks these terms, and if we do, credit unrelated to the breach is still returned.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living in Germany or Spain, you keep the protections of your own country's law and can bring a claim there.

If one clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. We may update these terms; the date at the top tells you when we last did, and if a change matters we will ask you to accept the new version rather than change the page quietly.

OxMenti is run by Richard Niemann and Aurora Vega Rodríguez, trading as OxMenti.