Social Care Tech is new terminology developed over many years of undertaking research. In essence it brings together social care practices and technology, so they merge as one. Some may remember prior to the Bichard Report (2004) and what happened prior to this was that practice was where the twain never met, for example in the case of recruitment and child protection. However, what we learnt was the need to bring recruitment and child protection (safeguarding) together, forming the very popular and integrated processes of safer recruitment. This is now and has been for some years as business as usual. This is the same vision and evidenced based research to support the introduction of Social Care Tech.

Let’s take the children and young people of today and how they live in new era of social technical childhood spaces. There is an ongoing contentious debate about children and young people on their mobile phones, so this cement’s that they are on their phones, iPad and using technology as part of an extension of self / self-imagein their everyday lived experiences. Children are digital natives and I believe their lived experience of childhood is within a social technical paradigm. I am not here to debate the issue of online harm and rightly so there are many processes and safeguarding support systems to combat the risks associated in the categories of online bullying, child sexual abuse material, grooming, etc. However, worryingly there is an extreme lack of technological or digital pathways and digital accessibility for children and young people to ask for help from public protections agencies. This includes being able to inform, share or access their digital records, share their information digitally, including being excluded from the design and implementation of those same public agency tech systems that are there as partof the protection processes.

Just imagine if children and young people were able not only to be treated as equal partners in the design of these internal systems but the system was born from the children’s voice in their digital language of today. Imagine if the social media outlets that have fallen short to protect them were also able to embed safety child led systems to also protect them. Imagine if these digital systems were joined upand were created agilely from a child’s perspective. How different the digital world could be for all children and those children as risk, furthermore, allowingfor and array of different digital responses from the adults working to keep them safe or reduce risks.  

After all children are the tech experts using them all day, every day. Imagine if from theirdevice they could alert instantly, shared their information and thisinformation would be directly from them – not verbatim and feed directly intosocial care referrals or access to services.  

Currently social care digital systems both here in the UK, as well as Europe and globally are generally created by adults with little evidence of children’s co-design.This is beginning to change with some new developments where social workers and tech partners are co-designing. I would argue though that yes, the social worker or practitioner is the end user of the actual system however there arealso the forgotten end user’s which are children and their families. It is welcoming to discover that there are more assisted AI and large language models now being embedded to assist with everyday social work and practitioners within multi-agency settings. However, this is very limited.

The elements to bring social care tech to the forefront of good practice will require policy changes with a key framework for social care tech working as one machine, one agenda to bridge the digital divides. Child initiated co-designed practice needsto be at the core of policy and digital safeguarding initiatives. Of course, senior leadership commitment to challenge the imposing limitations and recourses ofthe current architecture of case management systems. And most of all, believing that the child’s agency around tech safety is the essence of us moving intotheir world rather them moving into ours!

Dr Sarah Carlick is an expert consultant in social caretech – children’s digital safeguarding whose work focuses on how organisationscan use tech for good, through co-design with children and young people. Contact:sarah@mesafe.co.uk