Our promise for the moments that matter most. Published policy — draft for review with a safeguarding professional.
Every message is screened for safeguarding signals as part of normal processing. A flag routes the message to our on-call reviewer with a 15-minute acknowledgement target during service hours. Flagged content is never auto-rewritten into blandness — the concern is preserved, not smoothed away.
Depending on what we see: deliver the message unaltered with urgency, contact the sending or receiving parent, or signpost specialist support (NSPCC 0808 800 5000 · Family Lives 0808 800 2222 · Refuge 0808 2000 247 · Samaritans 116 123). And where a message discloses a criminal offence — for example, a credible threat of violence — we may report it to the police, as our privacy notice explains. We tell parents when we’ve done this unless doing so would increase risk.
We never ignore a flag, never leave the decision to software alone, never use safeguarding as a pretext to read messages beyond the flagged material, and never take sides between parents under the cover of safety.
Parents under strain say raw things to Sam that they’d never want passed on — that’s a feature, and it stays private. Safeguarding review is about risk of harm, not strong language.