Safe Messaging and your safeguarding policy

Safe Messaging exists because connecting adults with children has to be taken seriously. Safeguarding was the starting point for the design rather than something added at the end. But it is a tool, and a tool cannot hold a policy, train a volunteer or notice that something feels wrong. Those things stay with people. This article sets out where the line falls, so you can slot Safe Messaging into what your church already does.

What Safe Messaging does

• Nothing reaches a child until their parent or guardian has read the whole message and approved it. See What a parent sees, and how they approve a message.
• Only leaders you have specifically authorised can message a child at all. Turning Safe Messaging on tightens contact with children across your whole site, including for your administrators. See How to give a leader permission to send Safe Messages.
• Those leaders can only reach children they could already reach through their group access. It adds a check, it does not widen anyone’s reach.
• Messages are one-to-one and text only. There is no image or file sharing, and children are not part of group chats.
• A child can never start a conversation with an adult, and cannot reply at all unless your church has chosen to allow it. See Replies from children, and how they are approved.
• Every message to or from a child is kept permanently, whether it was approved, rejected or left to expire. Nothing can be quietly removed.
• Your named Safeguarding Lead has standing oversight of every one of those messages, through the Safeguarding Dashboard and the Safe Messages record.
• Parents can open a read-only view of their own child’s conversations, so a parent can always see exactly what their child sees.
• A weekly limit keeps contact purposeful rather than constant, and your Safeguarding Lead is alerted when a leader is approaching it. See How to choose your Safe Messaging settings.
• Accounts that change from child to adult are flagged for review, in case the change was made to get around the approval step.
• Every route to a child is covered, not just chat. Mailings, Broadcasts and text messages go through the same approval and the same record.

What it does not do

Safe Messaging does not vet your leaders, run your recruitment, hold your DBS records, deliver your training or write your policy. It does not decide who should be working with children in your church. It cannot tell you that a message which reads innocently is part of a pattern that does not. It sits under your existing safeguarding policy and your denomination’s guidance, and it assumes those are in place and being followed.

What your church needs to decide

Four things are worth deciding deliberately, and worth minuting so there is a record of the church having chosen rather than the setting having drifted.

1. Who your Safeguarding Lead is. Someone who already holds a safeguarding role, not whoever is most comfortable with computers. Only one person can hold it, so agree who covers their reviewing when they are away. See How to turn on Safe Messaging for your church.
2. Which leaders get permission, and when you review that list. The start of a school year is a natural point.
3. Whether children can reply. This is off by default and most churches will want to leave it off, because it keeps messaging one-way and removes any private back-and-forth. If you are considering turning it on, treat it as a safeguarding decision: talk it through with your Safeguarding Lead, check your governing body’s policy, and put any extra safeguards in place first.
4. How often your Safeguarding Lead reviews messages, and what happens when something needs following up.

Briefing your leaders

Tell your team plainly that their messages are read: by a parent before delivery, and by your Safeguarding Lead afterwards. This is not a warning, it is a reassurance. Working in the open protects good leaders as much as it protects children, and a leader who knows the arrangement can relax into it.

It is also worth saying what Safe Messaging is for. It is for the small things: remembering a football match, asking how an exam went, noticing that someone was missed. That is what good children’s and youth workers already do well, and this simply makes a little more of it possible through the week. Show them How to send a message to a child.

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Good to know

• We are not able to advise on your safeguarding or data protection obligations. Your denomination, your safeguarding adviser and your insurer are the right people for that, and it is worth checking with them before you roll Safe Messaging out.
• Your Safe Messages record is a genuine audit trail, so it can be produced for a safeguarding review or a leadership meeting. The date filters make pulling a term’s worth straightforward. Chat history is never deleted, and if your church faces a formal safeguarding case we can extract the relevant conversation data for you on request.
• Nobody has to use it. Safe Messaging is an option for leaders who want it, not something imposed on a children’s team.
• Our Safeguarding and Compliance Pack maps Safe Messaging against the guidance of the main denominations and includes a policy you can adopt, an Appropriate Policy Document template, and our retention and data-subject-rights procedure.
• Sharing our guide for parents and guardians with families ahead of time heads off most questions before they arrive.
• For the whole setup in order, see Setting up Safe Messaging, start to finish.