Your portfolio and your privacy

A portfolio asks you to write about yourself — about a placement that went badly, a thing you found hard, a goal you gave up on. That only works if you know exactly who can read what. This page tells you, in plain words.

Most of this page is about the Transition Year portfolio. If you're doing Leaving Certificate Life, Community and Work, one important rule is different for you, and it has its own section below.

The short version

In Transition Year, nothing you write can be read until you publish it. Every TY reflection starts as a draft, and a draft is yours alone — nobody can read it, however much you have written. You decide, one by one, when to publish a reflection to your portfolio, and that is when your teachers can read it. You can change your mind at any time — including after a teacher has already read something. Take it back to a draft and they lose access straight away. Life, Community and Work works the same way — see the LCW section.

Who can read your goals. The teachers who run your Transition Year group — your coordinator, and the colleagues they add to help — can read the goals you set and what you write when you review them. Nobody else can: not your other subject teachers, and nobody outside your school. This changed on 1 September 2026; before that nobody could read them at all. They are never marked, never scored and never put in a report, and every time a teacher opens your page it is written down. The ratings you give your own progress stay private — the number you put on yourself at each checkpoint is still yours alone.

Your school's copy gets deleted. Yours doesn't have to be. At the end of the year your school deletes the whole portfolio. Before that happens you get an email and a window of time — usually about two months — to download everything you wrote and keep it.

What we keep

Your name, your school email address, and a scrambled version of your password. We never store the password itself, so nobody here can read it or tell you what it is.
When you sign up we email a link to the address you gave, and your account only starts working once you click it. That email is sent for us by Brevo, an email service in the EU. If the address was typed wrongly, sign up again from your teacher's link and we send a new one.
Which class you're in.
Your reflections — what you wrote, the drafts along the way, and the developmental indicators you tagged them with.
Your work experience diary, if you keep one — your employer's name and address, the dates, what you wrote about the placement and each day, and any file you attach to it.
Your goals, the steps you set yourself, your reviews of them, and your self-ratings.
Anything you collect as evidence: notes, photos, voice recordings, documents.
Certificates you record, and a picture of one if you upload it.
Any file you hand up for an assignment — the same whether you chose it from the computer or picked it from your OneDrive.
Photos you add to an assignment, when your teacher asks for them. If you remove one, you won't see it any more, but your teacher still can — they need to know what was there when they marked it. Photos are never put in the record that goes with your work to the State Examinations Commission.
The link to a video, when your teacher asks for one. Your video stays in your own OneDrive or Google Drive; we only keep the link, so whoever you shared it with in your school can open it.
If your school gives credits for TY, the credits recorded for you.

Handing up a file from your OneDrive

On some school laptops nobody has signed in to the OneDrive app, so your own work is sitting in your school account with no way to get at it from the computer in front of you. That is why the file panel lets you sign in to OneDrive and pick the file there instead.

The same file panel appears wherever you add something to your portfolio — Saved for later, Collected artefacts, and when you attach something to a reflection, diary or entry — and it can use Google Drive as well as OneDrive. Everything below applies to all of them.

What you should know about it:

One short-lived cookie. When you press the OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox button we set a cookie that lasts ten minutes, so that we can tell the sign-in you started apart from anyone else's when you come back from that company's page. It holds no name, mark or anything you wrote. We set no other cookies.
You type your password on Microsoft's page, not ours. We never see it and we could not tell you what it is.
We only get the file you pick. We don't look through the rest of your OneDrive, and we don't keep a list of what is in it.
The connection ends when you log out. It also ends the moment anybody else logs in on that computer — so the next person in the room cannot open your OneDrive from the file panel. It does not sign you out of Microsoft itself, though, so if you signed in to your school account in the browser, sign out of that too before you walk away.

You never have to use it. Choosing a file from the computer works exactly as it always did.

Who can see what

Your TY coordinator, and the staff they add

Only the reflections you've published, and your work experience diary once you have finished and published it — a diary is a draft that only you can read until then. They can also see your certificates, and how much work you've done — how many reflections, when you last added something. That last part matters: it means writing honestly and keeping it as a draft never looks the same as doing nothing.

Running a whole year group is more than one person's job, so your coordinator can add colleagues from your school to help — sometimes a lot of them, because at the end of the year many teachers help read portfolios. Some are added by name; others join using a link your coordinator turned on. A colleague who joined by link can only read what you have published — reflections, finished work experience diaries and goals — and nothing else. One added by name can also enter credits and pull reports. Neither can ever read a reflection or diary you haven't published. The list of who they are is on your coordinator's own screen, so you can ask.

Your employer

Nobody at the place you did your work experience can see your diary. They don't have access to CourseworkHQ and there is no link to send them. If your school needs your employer's evaluation form, you can attach it to your diary yourself.

Your other teachers

Nothing. A teacher who takes you for a subject sees the work you hand up to them for that subject, the same as any other class — but your TY portfolio isn't part of it, even if that subject counts towards your credits. If a subject earns you credits, your coordinator enters the figure.

Other students

Nothing. There is no way for another student to see your portfolio.

Us — the people who run CourseworkHQ

We store your work so the app can show it to you, and we can technically reach it the way anyone running a website can reach what's on it. We don't read it, we don't analyse it, we don't score it, and we don't use it for anything except giving it back to you and to whoever you published it to.

If you're doing Life, Community and Work

LCW is a two-year Leaving Certificate subject. It works differently from Transition Year in three ways that are worth knowing before you write anything.

An entry is a draft, or you've submitted it. There's no third setting. While it's a draft it's yours: your teacher can see that you started an entry and the date, and not a word of what's in it. When you submit it, they can read it. That's the whole of it — the same as publishing a reflection in Transition Year, and there is no separate private-or-shared switch to think about.

Anything you want to keep to yourself, you keep as a draft. You never have to submit something. And because your teacher can always see that a draft exists and when you wrote it, writing something honest and keeping it to yourself never looks the same as doing no work at all. That part is the same as TY, and it's there for the same reason.

Why submitting matters at all. In sixth year your teacher has to be able to say the work is genuinely yours. They can only say that about work they have actually seen, over the two years. So the entries you submit are the ones that count as work they know about — which is a reason to submit things, not a reason you must.

Nobody marks your portfolio. Your teacher can comment on it and talk to you about it. They cannot grade it, score it, or mark it up for redrafting — the subject's own guidelines say they shouldn't, and there is no way in the app for them to do it. What you hand up to the State Examinations Commission in sixth year is a separate piece of work you build from your portfolio. The portfolio itself is never submitted.

Two more things. Your collected artefacts — the rough notes, photos and voice memos you save as you go — stays private to you in LCW as well; nobody sees an item until you attach it to an entry. And because LCW runs across fifth and sixth year into a State exam, your school keeps this portfolio longer than a TY one: it has to survive the move into sixth year, the exam, and the period afterwards when results can be appealed. You'll get the same download-your-own-copy window at the end.

Photos and recordings

These are switched off unless your school turns them on. If your school has turned them on, that's your school saying its photo-consent rules cover putting photos in your portfolio. If you'd rather not add photos of yourself or anyone else, you never have to — notes and documents work perfectly well as evidence.

If your school gives credits

Some schools award TY credits and some don't. Where they do, the parts counted automatically are counted from what you did — how many reflections you finished, how many indicators you evidenced, whether you reviewed your goals. Nothing counts the quality of your writing, and no computer reads what you wrote to decide a number.

Reflections you kept as drafts still count. You never have to choose between being honest and being credited for the work.

A teacher can change any counted figure, and has to write down why. Whether you can see your own running total is your school's decision, not ours.

If you've left yourself logged in somewhere

It happens — a school computer, a friend's laptop, a shared tablet at home. You don't have to ask anyone. Go to Account settings, find Signing in, and choose Sign out everywhere else. Every other device is signed out straight away, and you stay signed in where you are.

If you think someone has actually been using your account, change your password as well — that signs the other devices out too, and tells us nothing about who it was, so it's worth telling a teacher if you're worried.

You are also signed out on your own after two hours of not using CourseworkHQ. That is deliberately short, and it is because of the school computer in that list: the next person to sit down at it should not find your work open. It doesn't happen while you're working — the two hours start from the last thing you did — but it does mean you'll usually sign in again at the start of a lesson.

Getting your own copy

Use Download my portfolio on your portfolio page, any time you like. You get a web page you can open on any computer, with your photos, recordings and files beside it.

It includes the reflections and diaries you kept as drafts. Choosing not to publish something to a teacher was never about whether it was yours.

What happens at the end of the year

Your coordinator starts closing the year group. From that moment nothing can be edited — by you or by them.
You get an email with a date. Until that date, you can download your copy.
After the date, your coordinator deletes the year group. That removes everything: reflections, work experience diaries, goals, ratings, files, certificates, credits.
Deleted means deleted. We can't get it back for you afterwards, which is why the window and the email exist.

What you're entitled to ask for

The law gives you rights over information about you. In plain terms, you can ask to:

See everything held about you. For your portfolio you don't need to ask — the download button does it.
Correct anything wrong.
Delete your information, in some situations.
Object to how it's being used, or ask that it be limited.
Complain to Ireland's Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie if you think your information has been mishandled.

You don't have to be 18 to use any of these. They're yours now.

Before your school starts

Before a school can use CourseworkHQ with real students, it has to agree in writing to how we handle your information, and start a trial. Until it does, there is no account for you here at all — a teacher can set up their own materials, but nobody can add you or your class.

That is on purpose. It means there was never a stretch of time where we held your work while nobody had agreed to how it would be looked after. If a teacher tells you they are waiting on the school, that is what they are waiting for, and it is theirs to sort out rather than yours.

Who to ask

Start with your TY coordinator or another teacher you trust — your school decides how CourseworkHQ is used, so most questions are answered fastest there. If you'd rather ask us directly, or you're not happy with the answer you got, contact us using the details in the full privacy policy and we'll either sort it or pass it to your school and tell you we've done it.

This page is a plain-language summary written for students. It doesn't replace the full privacy policy, which has the complete detail and the legal wording — but nothing on this page contradicts it. If you spot something that looks like it does, tell us; that's a mistake worth fixing.