The homework

I didn’t build anything for the first few months. I read.

Australia went first, so I started there. They brought in the restriction for under-16s, the accounts came off, and I wanted to know what actually happened afterwards rather than what everyone said would happen. The short version is that the accounts went and nothing arrived in their place. The reporting says kids drifted into group chats and smaller corners nobody’s watching, though nobody has properly measured that yet. The removal worked. Nothing got put back.

We’ve announced the same thing here. And as far as I can tell we’re copying the shape of what Australia did without anyone sitting down and looking hard at how it went. That seemed worth doing before building anything.

Then I went through what schools already have. Around sixty products. The management systems everyone runs on, the parent apps, the homework tools, the safeguarding systems, the messaging platforms.

Nearly all of them use the word community. Almost none of them mean it. Look at what they actually do and it’s a school talking to parents. Messages out, receipts back, how many opened it. They’re good at that and schools need it. But there’s no part of any of it a child ever touches. The biggest system in Australia has fifty-odd modules and not one lets a pupil see another pupil.

The word belonging turns up twice in that entire market, and one of those is a vendor selling schools on keeping families signed up.

So the gap wasn’t a hunch I went looking to confirm. It’s just what was left over once I’d been through everything else.

I’ll be honest that a gap can mean two things. Either nobody has built it, or people have looked and decided the safeguarding risk isn’t worth carrying. I think it’s the first. I’ve written the second one down and kept it where I can see it.

Then I started on the product.

Simon Seward