Your privacy and the Accounting Education Barometer
The Accounting Educator Barometer is an anonymous survey of how it feels to teach accounting. We have built it so that taking part leaves no trail back to you. This page explains in plain terms what we collect, what we don’t, and how we use AI to make sense of what you tell us.
The short version
Your survey answers are anonymous. We don’t ask for your name, your email or your employer, and we don’t record anything that would let us identify you. We use AI to help us spot themes across hundreds of written comments. If you ask us to send you the report, your email is collected separately and is not connected to your survey answers.
Your answers are anonymous
The survey asks for no personal details. There is no login, no name field and no email field. We have switched off the recording of IP addresses, so we don’t keep the digital address your response was sent from. There is a single hidden field in the survey that protects us from spam bots — it shares nothing with any outside service and collects nothing about you.
Because we hold no identifying information, we cannot tell who gave any particular answer, and neither can anyone else.
The written comments
A few questions invite you to write freely. These open answers are valuable and we’d rather you wrote more than less. We ask you not to include anything that identifies you, your colleagues or your place of work.
If a written answer does mention a name or an identifying detail, we remove it before the comment is analysed or quoted, and we never publish a comment in a way that could point back to any individual or organisation.
How we make sense of the responses, including our use of AI
Once responses are in, we analyse them as a whole. The numbers become charts and a single headline “Mood Index”; the written comments are grouped into themes and we report in aggregate what people are telling us.
To help with the written comments, we may use AI tools — for example, to group similar answers together and summarise the common threads. When we do, we obey these rules:
- We work only with answers stripped of identifying detail.
- We use AI to find patterns across many responses, not to profile, score or single out any individual.
- We never use AI — or anything else — to try to work out who you are.
We choose our tools and settings to keep your responses private to this project, and your answers are not used to train public AI models. We make the judgments and interpretations that go into the final report.
If you ask us to send you the report
At the end of the survey you can leave your email address to receive the report when it’s published. This is entirely optional, and it is handled completely separately from your answers:
- Your email is collected through a different form and stored on a separate mailing list (we use Mailchimp).
- It is never linked to your survey responses, so leaving it does not make your answers any less anonymous.
- We use it only to send you the Barometer report and relevant Accounting Cafe news.
- You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in every email we send.
The website itself
This privacy notice covers the survey. The wider Accounting Cafe website has its own Privacy Policy and, like most sites, we use services for analytics and to keep things running. These may set cookies, which is why you saw a consent banner when you first visited (managed by Cookiebot), where you can accept or decline them. These are separate from your survey responses which stay anonymous either way.
You can change your cookie settings by clicking the paper clip icon at the bottom left of your browser window.
Who we are
The Barometer is run by Accounting Cafe which is a company limited by guarantee based in the UK. It is responsible for your data and handles the small amount of information involved — essentially, the anonymous responses and the separate mailing list — in line with UK data-protection law.
If you have any questions about your data, or you’d like your email removed from the mailing list, write to us at hello@accountingcafe.org and we’ll sort it out.
How long we keep things
We keep the anonymous survey responses for as long as the Barometer runs so that we can track how the mood of the field shifts from one year to the next. Because responses carry no personal data, keeping them raises no privacy concerns.
Email addresses are kept indefinitely. If you unsubscribe, your email address is removed from our lists immediately.
Last updated: June 2026.
