Review guidelines
What a review should be, what gets taken down, and how to argue with us when we get it wrong.
Last updated: 23 August 2026
These are the rules our moderators actually apply. They are published in full because a moderation decision nobody can check is a decision nobody should trust — and because a school that wants a review removed is entitled to know in advance whether it will be.
What makes a review worth publishing
The reviews people find useful all look alike: they say what happened, to whom, and when.
- You were there. You studied, taught, worked or sent a child there — not a friend of yours.
- It is specific. "Poorly organised" tells nobody anything; "timetables changed twice a term and nobody was told" does.
- It says when. A school under a head who left four years ago is a different school, and the years you attended are part of the review for that reason.
- It is about the education — teaching, support, facilities, how the place treated you. Not the fees, not the town, not one bad day.
- It is what you actually think. A review does not have to be balanced to be honest, and a glowing one is as welcome as a damning one.
One review per subject, per person
You may review the school and separately review a programme within it, because those are different subjects. You may not review the same subject twice, from one account or from several. Changed your mind, or something improved? Edit the review you already wrote — the edit is visible as an edit, which is more persuasive than a second opinion pretending to be a second person.
Do not name individuals
Write about teaching as much as you like, and do not name the teacher. Reviews of teaching are reviews of a person's work, and a named person cannot answer a public rating on equal terms. Where the site rates teaching at all it does so behind a number, and only where enough colleagues and enough reviews exist that the number cannot be worked out by elimination. A review that names a member of staff is edited or removed — not because the criticism is unwelcome, but because publishing it under a name is not ours to do.
What gets removed
A review is removed, or the offending part edited out, when a moderator can point at one of these. Each is written to be decidable by a person reading the review rather than to describe a mood.
- Personal attacks on a named individual
- Abuse, mockery of appearance, accent, disability or private life, or any attack aimed at a person rather than at the education. Naming a member of staff at all falls here.
- False statements of fact
- An opinion cannot be false — "the teaching was poor" is protected however much it stings. A factual assertion can be: a specific, checkable claim of theft, abuse, fraud or a criminal offence is removed unless the person making it can point to something on the public record. We remove first and look afterwards where the claim is about an identifiable person.
- Health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality
- Special-category personal data about anybody — a pupil, a teacher, a parent — is removed on sight, whether the reference is hostile or not.
- Personal data and contact details
- Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social media handles or photographs of any identifiable person, including yourself. This is the one category where the harm falls on somebody who never chose to be on the site.
- Undisclosed conflicts of interest
- Reviewing your own employer without saying you work there, reviewing a competitor, reviewing on someone else's instructions, or reviewing in exchange for anything at all. Staff may review their own school — say so in the relationship field and it is published as a staff review.
- Incentivised or solicited reviews
- Anything written for a reward, requested from a filtered group of happy people, or written by an institution about itself. Where a pattern shows up, the whole batch comes down and the institution is told why.
- Spam, marketing and off-topic posts
- Advertising, links to unrelated sites, repeated text, machine-generated filler, or content that is not about the subject being reviewed.
- Hate speech, threats and harassment
- Attacks on a group by race, religion, nationality, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation; threats of violence; sustained targeting of one person.
- No first-hand experience
- Reports of what somebody else told you, reviews of a school you never attended, or reviews written about a place after reading about it in the news.
- Unlawful content
- Anything unlawful under Dutch or EU law, or under the law of the country the subject is in, including material that infringes someone else's copyright.
What does not get removed
These come up in almost every takedown request we receive, and none of them is a ground on its own.
- A low rating. A poor score is not a reason to remove a review, and we will say so in writing.
- Criticism the institution disagrees with, or thinks is unfair, or believes to be unrepresentative.
- An old review. Old reviews carry the years they refer to and count for less over time; they are not deleted for being inconvenient.
- The fact that the reviewer is pseudonymous. Pseudonymity is a deliberate protection for people who are still at the institution they are describing.
- A review you would rather answer than remove. That is what the right of reply is for, and a good reply persuades more readers than a takedown would.
How a decision is made
Every submission is checked automatically for spam, duplication and personal data before it is published, and anything over the threshold waits for a person instead of going live. After publication, a complaint opens a case in the same queue. A moderator reads the review, the complaint and the checks, decides, and writes the reason down; the reason is stored with the decision and can be produced later. Every action is appended to a log that nothing in the product can edit.
We aim to answer a notice within five working days, and faster where it concerns personal data about someone who never chose to be here.
Appealing a removal
If your review was removed, you can ask for it back through the notice and complaints form: give the reference from the message we sent you and say why you think the decision was wrong. A different person reviews it, and if they disagree with the original decision the review is restored with its original date. If they agree with it, you get the reasoning in writing rather than a repeated refusal.
An institution that disagrees with a decision uses the same route and gets the same answer — including when the decision was not to remove.
If you are the institution
You can publish one reply to every review about you, pinned under it, free and whether or not you are a partner. In our experience it works better than a takedown request: readers can tell the difference between a school that answers criticism and a school that tries to remove it.