Safeguarding
The Phone in Their Pocket: Rethinking Digital Safeguarding in Foster Care
There are over 100,000 looked-after children in the UK. Most of them have a smartphone. And safeguarding hasn’t kept up.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional safeguarding must evolve to address digital risks that travel with looked-after children.
- Compass Community co-designed Voop, a digital safeguarding tool that blocks known bad actors in real-time while allowing safe smartphone access.
- In a 14-child pilot, Voop successfully accelerated the resolution of missing episodes and blocked hidden, harmful contact.
- Blanket phone bans fail children by isolating them; the goal must be safe access, not no access.
The Digital Safeguarding Gap
Risk no longer sits in homes, schools and communities. It travels. It pings. It calls. It follows a child wherever they go. So, we asked ourselves a simple question: what does safeguarding look like when risk lives in a child’s hand?
That question led us to Voop. And to something we believe can change how this sector thinks about digital safeguarding.
Voop: A Solution Built With Compass, for Foster Children
This wasn’t a technology company pitching a product. Compass has been a design partner from the start, working with Voop over more than a year through workshops, co-design sessions and rigorous testing.
We consulted children directly. We involved social workers and foster parents. We worked with safeguarding and legal experts to make sure what we were building was grounded in the realities of care, and aligned with children’s rights, not just operationally useful to the adults around them.
The result is a product shaped by the people who have to live with it, including the children themselves.
Real-World Impact: Seeing the Invisible Threats
We think about missing episodes as physical events. But there’s a major digital component. Who’s messaging them? Who’s calling them? Who’s keeping them gone?
Dealing with a Missing Episode — Fast
A young person went missing in one of our homes. It happens. He’d turned off his location. He was gone.
But the team had a Voop-enabled device. They knew his pattern. He didn’t just run, he performed. The adventure only worked if people could see it on social media. So, they removed his access to apps and texts.
The phone didn’t disappear. It became a direct line to the adults who cared about him. He called. Not because he wanted to come back. Because the performance had collapsed.
“It was just really smooth. He was furious he couldn’t brag about his adventures,” our Registered Manager told me.
Blocking Harmful Contact in Real Time
During this pilot, we blocked over 80 attempted calls to one child in a single weekend, from someone neither the foster carer nor the Local Authority wanted anywhere near them. Here’s the thing. This isn’t new. This has always been happening. We just couldn’t see it.
Before Voop, the phone in a child’s pocket was a window into their world we had no way of looking through. The threat wasn’t invisible because it wasn’t there. It was invisible because we had no way of seeing it.
If that volume of contact happened at the front door, we’d call it what it is. Dangerous. But it happens through a phone, so it’s not visible. This is not an unusual case. It is the environment our children are growing up in.
Why Taking Phones Away Doesn’t Work
The old response: take the phone away. It sounds decisive. It isn’t.
A phone isn’t just a risk. It’s a child’s friendships, identity, sense of normality. Remove it and you don’t remove the need. You just push it somewhere you can’t see or influence.
We need safe access. Not no access.
How Voop Safeguards Children in Real Time
Voop devices operate as normal phones. But safeguarding happens in real time. Known bad actors get blocked immediately. Risk is visible. Missing episodes get resolved faster.
The phone becomes part of the safeguarding system, not something sitting outside it. Carers and colleagues get better information, sooner, without more paperwork.
This is not surveillance. It’s safeguarding for the world we actually live in.
Early Results from the Compass Pilot
Fourteen children in the pilot. Early stages. But the signals are clear.
Missing episodes resolve faster. Harmful contact gets interrupted earlier. Children stay connected to the right people. Foster parents feel more confident.
And we’re seeing things we simply couldn’t see before. The scale of harmful contact isn’t new. It was always there. We just had no way of knowing.
Setting a New Standard for the Sector
Risk has moved into apps, messages, group chats and live streams. If our response stays where it was, we’re not protecting children. We’re reacting too late.
At Compass, we’re not prepared to accept that.
This is a pilot. But the ambition is clear. If it works, and we believe it will, this should not stop with Compass. It should become the standard.
100,000 children need protection in the digital world, not just the physical one.
If we can block 80 harmful calls to one child in a weekend, what might we prevent at scale? And what are we still not seeing in the children we haven’t reached yet?
That is the opportunity. Not removing the phone. Making it safe.
Stacy Wallace
CEO, Compass Community
Is your current agency ignoring the digital reality?
