The government’s ban on social media for under-16s has landed with the force you’d expect. Parents are relieved. Tech platforms are scrambling. Commentators are arguing about age verification and VPNs. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise sits a question that matters far more to social workers than to anyone else in the debate: once the door to social media closes, where do children go to be heard?
It’s a fair question, and not a rhetorical one. For most children, social media is entertainment, connection, distraction. Losing it will be an adjustment, but not a loss of something essential. For the children social workers work with every day, though, digital spaces have often meant something different. A message to a sibling in another placement. A way to stay in touch with a worker between visits. Somewhere to say something difficult without having to say it out loud to an adult sitting across a table.
That’s the part of this ban that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Removing unsafe, unstructured platforms is the right call. Nobody working in child protection would argue otherwise. But a ban on where harm can happen isn’t the same as a plan for where a child’s voice goes instead. If we’re not careful, we risk quietly assuming that less social media means less need for digital participation altogether. It doesn’t. If anything, the opposite is true.
Children in care, children on child protection plans, children navigating the care system’s endless meetings and reviews, already have a hard enough time being heard through the channels available to them. Take away one of the informal, low-stakes ways they might express themselves, and the formal channels need to work harder to fill that gap. A review meeting every few months isn’t a substitute for a way to say “I’m not okay” on a Tuesday afternoon.
This is exactly the gap that purpose-built participation tools are designed to close, and it’s worth being honest about the distinction, because it’s an important one. A tool built specifically to help a child communicate with their social worker isn’t a smaller, safer version of social media. It’s a different thing entirely. There’s no algorithm trying to keep them scrolling. No stranger who could message them. No pressure to perform for an audience. Just a direct, private, structured way to say what’s on their mind, when they’re ready to say it, to someone who’s actually responsible for their wellbeing.
That’s not a workaround for the social media ban. It’s what should have been happening all along, ban or no ban. The ban simply makes the case louder.
For social workers, this is worth sitting with for a moment. The pressures on your time and caseloads aren’t going anywhere, and no digital tool replaces the relationship you build with a child face to face. But a tool that lets a child flag how they’re feeling before a visit, or reflect on a decision after one, or simply say something they couldn’t quite get out in the room, doesn’t compete with that relationship. It supports it. It gives you information you might not otherwise get, at a moment you might otherwise miss.
The social media ban is a genuine, well-intentioned attempt to protect children from real harm. It deserves to be taken seriously as that. But protecting children from harmful spaces and giving them a safe space to be heard are two different jobs, and only one of them is being solved by this policy. The other one is still ours to get right.
Closing one door is easy to announce. Making sure another one stays open, on purpose, built for the child rather than around them, is the harder and more important work. That’s the conversation worth having next.