Why I took over Govox

I first came across Govox in 2021, when I was at Fullmer. I liked it then and I like it now. So when the chance came to run it in May, it wasn’t a hard decision.

What it does is simple. A young person gets asked how they’re doing, and if the answer is worrying, a named adult in that school finds out which child it is, that day. Everything else I’d seen gave you percentages and averages and left the school noticing things in corridors and hoping the right child said something to the right adult.

I’d had a version of the same problem in companies. Everyone bought something after Covid. An app, a run of webinars, a step challenge in February. Some of it was fine. A lot of it was there so there was something to point at, and I’m not saying that from the outside, I’ve bought some of it myself and sat in the meetings where it got signed off.

In schools it’s bigger than people tend to say out loud. Anyone working in one will tell you what the last few years have been like, and what’s arrived to help hasn’t really matched it. Most of it measures the problem rather than doing much about it.

What I want to do with it is mostly unexciting. Make it quicker to set up, make the alert land with the right person, make it obvious what to do when it does. Then do the same for workplaces, where we’ve proved a lot less than we have in education.

I don’t know yet whether that second part works the way the first one has. We haven’t shown it. And I’m still learning how education actually buys, which is slower and stranger than I expected.

The rebuild runs across this academic year, so I’ll know by the summer whether I’ve called it right.

Simon Seward