You may have heard of ‘Secure by design’ – a way of working that embeds a positive and proactive security and privacy culture into a company, and encourages everyone to design and embed security into products and processes right from the start.
We do all of that, but because we provide remote work experiences to thousands of 13-18 year olds, we have to take things up a notch!
Safeguarding young people is at the heart of everything we design, build and deliver.
So we introduced ‘Safeguarding By Design’ – which embeds a positive and proactive safeguarding culture at the heart of how products and services are designed for young people.
This means that everything we do (and we mean everything!) is put through a lens of safeguarding right from the start. It has resulted in a number of key decisions within the business, covering our products, our team and our processes.
And the result of those decisions? Well, to be honest it’s more work, more rigour, and particularly relating to our digital delivery platforms, it makes things just that bit harder. However, that extra work is always worth it!
The hardest challenge sometimes is getting people to truly understand what the risks are and how you can mitigate against them when you put a bunch of teens together, especially online. This is especially important when you want everyone in your team to look at and question everything we do through the lens of safeguarding, when it’s sometimes hard to get your head around.
To help out we decided to use the analogy of the school playground.
We imagine everything we do (it could be a digital product we provide, or a process we use) using this analogy, since it really highlights some key questions that work wonderfully to focus the mind:
- Who is responsible for everyone in that playground? Are there always trusted and responsible adults in the playground when any young people are out there?
- Are there places in that playground that 2 or more young people can go to hide? If that happens, and they are out of view from a responsible person, what may happen?
- If something did happen, do all the young people in the playground know what to do? If something happened to them, or they saw something happen to someone else, is it really clear who they should go and speak to or contact, and how to do that?
- If a young person comes to us to tell us something, do WE know what to do with that information?
One of our programmes in particular The SuperSquad requires us to get 30-100 teens using an online chat/messaging tool (like Slack, or Teams).
Now imagine an app that does this but through the lens of the questions from the playground…
It meant we had to meet these minimum requirements. These were all non-negotiable:
- No DM feature between participants, full stop.
- Participants can always DM someone from the team at any point. Our team can also DM participants directly too.
- Group chats are always supervised, ensuring that support is always available. There is always someone (and this is the overlap with people and process) who is DBS checked in every group discussion.
- No hidden or private content posts between anyone.
- No anonymity.
That made it quite a tough challenge, since we can’t use Slack (age limit and inability to meet our needs), and frankly we just didn’t get along with Microsoft Teams, so we decided to built on Mattermost. Before you wonder, no, we are not sponsored or supported by them and get nothing more than a warm glow for highlighting a fantastic piece of tech from a great team!
We use a self-hosted, open-source version that we customised to create a “SafeTech” experience. It’s a place that gives young people a real experience of using tools like this professionally, but in a safe way.
And the result? In several years of running these programs, we’ve only had one incident — and it was due to a social media post outside of our platform. This reaffirmed our belief in creating a contained, safeguarded space for young people where they can learn real skills to support their future careers.
It may be tough, but it’s worth it.
Safeguarding is about giving young people the freedom to grow within a safe framework, and we’re excited to share how this approach is woven into every product we create!
