Socialheads
Why WhatsApp isn't suitable for social care work
WhatsApp is widely used in practice because it works and young people respond to it. But it was not designed for safeguarding, case recording or organisational oversight.
WhatsApp is quick, familiar and widely used. It’s also unsuitable for professional safeguarding environments.
According to the Children’s Commissioner’s report “Access Denied” (2023):
“Nine in ten children aged 8–17 use private messaging services. Over a third have received something that made them feel uncomfortable.”
— Children’s Commissioner for England, 2023
Many of these children were below the minimum age for WhatsApp — which was 16 until April 2024, when WhatsApp lowered it to 13 in the UK. This change, while aligning with global standards, sparked criticism from children’s rights advocates who argued that appropriate safeguards should have been established first.
Yet practitioners often use WhatsApp because young people simply don’t answer phone calls or emails.
Meanwhile, Ofcom’s 2021 Media Use and Attitudes report found that:
“62% of children aged 8–11 already use messaging apps, despite minimum age limits.”
In practice, this means social workers are communicating on unregulated apps that store personal data on private devices. Conversations must then be manually copied into systems like Liquidlogic or Mosaic — a process described by one worker in our interviews as “copy-and-paste chaos.”
Even with the lowered age limit, WhatsApp remains unsuitable for professional care settings because it wasn’t designed with safeguarding, audit trails, or organisational oversight in mind.
The problem isn’t that workers are careless. It’s that the sector hasn’t provided safe, purpose-built tools that meet young people where they are and satisfy safeguarding law.
A safer platform should:
- Support age-appropriate access
- Enable automatic audit trails
- Protect personal boundaries
- Keep communication and record-keeping connected
References
- Children’s Commissioner for England. Access Denied: Children’s Experiences of Online Messaging. 2023.
- Ofcom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2020–21. 2021.
- WhatsApp. Updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policies for UK users. Effective 11 April 2024.
About Socialheads: We're a UK social enterprise working to create purpose-built communication tools for social care. Our platform is being co-designed with practitioners, young people and organisations to address the real challenges discussed in this article.
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Written by Jeremy