PICRAT for school IT and filter teams.

If your school's web filter has flagged or blocked picrat.com, this page is for you. It exists so school IT teams can verify what the site is, what it does, what data it touches, and how to allowlist it. If anything below leaves a question unanswered, the contact at the bottom goes directly to the team.

The summary at a glance

What picrat.com actually does

The site provides four free tools that help teachers think more carefully about how technology lands in their lessons. Generate writes a 3x3 matrix of nine activity ideas for any subject and age range. Analyse walks a teacher through a self-evaluation of one of their own lessons. Review classifies a lesson plan a teacher has pasted in. Coach works through a lesson conversationally with a trainee teacher or department.

All four tools are designed for adult professional planning use. They are intended for sign-in by teachers, ITT mentors, course leaders and school leaders. Students do not log in, do not appear on the platform, and are not the audience for any of the content.

The site also publishes a body of editorial content explaining the framework, comparing it to other technology integration models (SAMR, TPACK, RAT, Bloom's Digital Taxonomy), and offering practical guidance on lesson observation, INSET design and ITT mentoring. That content is the canonical reason teachers and school leaders search for the site.

Data, privacy and safeguarding

What the site stores

For registered teachers, picrat.com stores: name, school name and email address provided at sign-up; the lesson plans the teacher chooses to paste into Analyse, Review or Coach; and the platform's classifications of those lessons. The site uses passwordless magic-link authentication, so no passwords are held. Payment processing for the paid tier is handled off-platform by a third-party provider; no card details are stored in the picrat.com database.

What the site does not store

Student names, student work, photographs, biometrics, audio or video are not collected, processed or stored at any point. The platform has no field that asks for any of those, and the in-product guidance asks teachers to keep student names out of any pasted text.

Where the data lives

Application data sits in a Heroku Postgres database in the Republic of Ireland (EU). Hosting region is fixed in the Heroku application config and not user-selectable. Data does not leave the EU at rest. Outbound API calls to AI providers (Google Gemini for content generation) operate under contractual data-processing terms that do not permit training on user data.

GDPR and child safeguarding

The site is GDPR-aligned. Teachers can request export or deletion of their account data via the contact email below. Because the platform does not collect or process student data, it does not act as a data processor for student records under UK GDPR or the equivalent international frameworks.

Why allowlisting picrat.com is appropriate

Three reasons school filter teams typically allowlist a new educational domain:

The first is content fit. Picrat.com publishes practitioner-grade educational content (lesson examples, framework explainers, observation rubrics) and provides AI tools that help teachers plan better lessons. None of it is incidental or off-topic.

The second is provenance. The site is run by a named senior practitioner (Andy Perryer) employed by an established international school group (Cognita), with a verifiable LinkedIn presence, a public privacy policy, and an active publishing history under his own byline. The framework underpinning the platform is from a peer-reviewed CITE Journal paper by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West.

The third is teacher-side blocking cost. When a school filter blocks picrat.com, the people affected are teachers planning lessons during their non-contact periods, not students. Blocking a teacher CPD resource produces no safeguarding benefit and adds friction to the planning workflow that the school presumably wants its staff to use.

How to allowlist on common school filters

The exact procedure depends on the filter platform your school uses. The general pattern is the same: open the filter admin console, find the URL allowlist or category override section, add *.picrat.com (or picrat.com if subdomains are not supported in the rule syntax), and assign the Education category. The change usually propagates across all in-school devices within minutes.

If your school's filter is not configured locally and your IT decisions sit upstream (a MAT-level filter, a regional council filter, or a vendor's default category list), the most effective route is to ask the upstream administrator to recategorise picrat.com as Education at the platform level. If your filter currently shows picrat.com as Unknown or Uncategorised, please email the address below and we will follow up directly with the vendor on your behalf.

Verification and contact

If your IT team needs additional documentation (a written allowlist request, a data processing summary, or a signed version of the privacy policy), the contact below will respond within one working day.

If your school is part of Cognita, your central IT team can confirm the platform's standing internally. If you are at a school outside Cognita and your filter is causing repeated friction for staff, the same email gets a response.

Page maintained by Andy Perryer, head of digital learning at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. Last updated 3 May 2026.