The Statutory Education Licence, explained for centre owners

You've been photocopying chapter 4 of the same textbook for your Year 9 comprehension class since 2015. One day a parent, a new tutor or a publisher asks whether you're allowed to. In Australia the answer is usually yes, if your centre holds a Statutory Education Licence and stays inside its limits. The rest of this guide is what that licence is, what it doesn't settle, and why the answer is different across the Tasman.

What the licence is

Under the Copyright Act 1968, a statutory licence administered by the Copyright Agency allows educational institutions to copy limited portions of published works for educational purposes, in return for a fee. It covers schools and TAFEs, and it covers around a thousand private providers, explicitly including tutoring organisations.

That last part is the one most owners don't know. The licence isn't a schools-only arrangement that a tutoring centre borrows by analogy. Tutoring organisations are named. If you copy from published textbooks, you should hold one regardless of whether you ever use a platform, because it's the thing that makes the photocopying you already do legitimate.

The limit is up to 10% or one chapter of a published work. So chapter 4 of the comprehension book is inside the limit. Three chapters of the same book is a different conversation, and it's a conversation to have with the Copyright Agency, not with us.

The fee and the terms are the Copyright Agency's to explain. We don't quote them here because they're not ours to quote, and because the number that matters is the one on your own agreement.

The short glossary entry has the same description in three sentences, for a tutor who asks.

What it covers, and what it leaves open

It helps to separate the material a centre teaches from into categories, because the licence only speaks to one of them.

The first row is the one to notice. A centre that has built fifteen years of its own material is, for most of its drawer, in the row where no licence is needed. The licence question only applies to the part of the drawer that came from a book.

Material you wrote yourself needs no licence

This is the sentence to hold onto. If you wrote the worksheet, the rule sheet, the practice paper, the answer key, you hold the copyright in it, and you can copy it, hand it out, put it on a platform and take it off again. There's no licence, no limit and nobody to ask.

Most good centres wrote most of their material. The Year 6 fractions sheets, the timed reasoning sets tuned to the test, the rule boxes, the term tests. It's the reason a family chose you over the centre down the road, and it's also the part of your material with the simplest rights position.

Which is why, in the guide to digitising your material, the start-here rule is your best folder. Your best folder is nearly always one you wrote, and it goes onto a platform with no rights question attached.

The complication is that fifteen years of a shared drive mixes the two. The sheet you wrote sits next to the chapter you scanned. A tutor's set from 2018 borrows a passage from a book and nobody remembers which. That's what the register is for.

The four rights categories

For every document a centre teaches from, there are four honest answers to "where did this come from?"

The fourth category is not a failure. It's the honest state of a lot of material in a lot of centres, and writing it down is better than pretending it's the first category. A document in the fourth row stays out of use until it moves to one of the other three.

The material rights register is a printable grid and a spreadsheet layout with one row per document and these four categories explained in plain language. It also carries a short note on what to do if a publisher contacts you, which is a page you want to have read before the day you need it.

Why a register per document matters

The first time anyone asks where a worksheet came from, you want the answer already written down. Not reconstructed from memory, not guessed from the font.

Three reasons it's per document rather than per folder.

The rights position genuinely varies inside a folder. A Year 9 English folder has your comprehension questions, which you wrote, wrapped around a passage from a published book, which you didn't. One row for the folder can't capture that. Two rows can.

It's the record a professional centre keeps. A publisher's query, a tutor's question, a parent's curiosity, a buyer doing due diligence on the centre in five years' time. All of them are answered by the same page.

And it's the record that lets you move quickly. A centre with a register knows on the day which folders are in the first category and can act on those without waiting for anyone. A centre without one has to audit before it can do anything.

Fill it in during the material audit, when you're already looking at each folder and still remember which ones you wrote. Update it whenever a folder is added.

The open question: uploading for conversion

Here's the part we're careful about, and you should be too.

The Statutory Education Licence makes copying from a published text legitimate for a licensed centre, within its limits. Whether that licence also covers uploading the copied pages to a third-party platform so they can be converted into practice sets is a separate question, and it isn't one we answer. It has to go to the Copyright Agency or a lawyer.

We say that plainly for a reason. A software company telling you that your licence covers what the software does is a software company with an interest in the answer. The person who can tell you is the licensing body that issued it, or an adviser who acts for you.

What that means in practice is simple. Convert what you wrote first. For material in the third category, record the licence and the limit in the register, then ask the Copyright Agency the specific question before uploading it: does my licence cover uploading these pages to a platform for conversion? Write down what they say.

What we do at upload

Every document uploaded to the platform records its rights basis: your own, licensed, or copied under a Statutory Education Licence. It isn't a checkbox to click past. It's the register, kept where the material lives.

In New Zealand we ask one extra question at upload, for the reason in the next section: how much of this did you write yourself?

Beyond that, the position on ownership is the one on the security and ownership page. You keep every right to your material and to anything derived from it. We claim none. We never reuse it, never redistribute it, and never use it to train any model. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else. Nothing downloads out of the platform, and if you leave we delete our copies within 30 days and confirm it in writing.

That's the software side. It doesn't answer the licence question, and it isn't meant to. It means that whatever your rights position is, it's the same after upload as before.

New Zealand is different

The Australian licence has no counterpart that a commercial New Zealand centre can lean on in the same way.

Under New Zealand's Copyright Act 1994, an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit. A commercial tutoring centre isn't one. So a centre run as a business cannot rely on the educational copying exceptions, and a centre that wants to copy published material generally needs a CLNZ business licence. CLNZ is Copyright Licensing New Zealand, which administers licences for copying published works.

The CLNZ licence glossary entry is the short version. The New Zealand page has the wider picture, including the current NCEA reform, which is sending every centre in the country back through its material anyway.

The same caution applies as in Australia. This is a description of what exists. CLNZ or your own adviser confirms your position.

The practical consequence for a New Zealand centre

The consequence is that a New Zealand centre's self-authored material is on much firmer ground than its photocopied textbook pages.

So the order of work is sharper. Audit by how much you wrote. A folder you wrote entirely goes first. A folder that's yours around a published passage gets split in the register: your questions in the first category, the passage in the third or fourth. A folder that's mostly copied waits until you hold the licence or have replaced the copied part with your own.

Most good New Zealand centres wrote most of theirs, so this is less of a constraint than it sounds. And the NCEA revision that's already underway is a natural moment to do it: the notes and sets being rewritten for the updated standards are, by definition, yours.

This week

Open the material rights register. Take your three most-used folders and give each document a row and a category. Count how many are in the first row. That's the material you can convert this week with no rights question attached.

For anything in the third row, find your centre's licence, note the number and the limit next to each document, and write down the one question to ask the Copyright Agency or CLNZ. For anything in the fourth row, don't use it until it moves.

If you're in Australia and copy from textbooks but don't hold a Statutory Education Licence, that's the first phone call, and it has nothing to do with software.