Socialheads
Messaging built for
schools and trusts
A safe place for staff to talk to each other instead of the WhatsApp group, and a governed channel to pupils where that is the right thing to do.
Two things schools use it for
Most schools start with the first and add the second later, if it applies to them at all.
Core, from £3,000 a year
Staff talking to staff
Most schools have a staff WhatsApp group. It is where cover gets arranged, where a concern gets mentioned before anyone writes it up, and where a photo of an incident occasionally lands. It is also on everyone's personal phone, outside the school's control, and it usually contains pupil information.
Socialheads gives that conversation somewhere it belongs: group chats for year teams, phases, safeguarding leads or a whole trust, on staff members' own devices, with the school owning the record and access ending the day someone leaves.
Safeguarding Plus, from £7,500 a year
Staff talking to pupils, where appropriate
Not every pupil, and not every member of staff. This is for the contact that already happens and currently has nowhere safe to live: pastoral and mentoring relationships, alternative provision, persistent absence, a looked-after child placed out of area, counselling, family support.
Named staff get a governed channel to the specific pupils they support, with consent recorded, safeguarding oversight and a record the school keeps.
Alongside what you already run
Schools are not short of software, so it is worth being clear about the job this does and the jobs it leaves alone.
Socialheads is messaging: the staff team’s group chat, and a governed channel to the pupils your team supports. It sits alongside your existing systems rather than replacing any of them.
CPOMS or MyConcern stay your safeguarding record, and concerns raised here feed them. Teams and Google Classroom stay your classroom tools. Newsletters, absence and payments stay in the systems built for them, and your filtering and monitoring arrangements carry on unchanged.
Compliance with Keeping Children Safe in Education lives in your policies and your practice. What Socialheads adds is the record that supports them.
What happens now
The staff group chat is the obvious one. It exists because it works, and nobody set out to put safeguarding conversations and pupil names on a consumer app. It happened because that is where the staff team already was, and there was no alternative that did the job.
The harder problem is reaching a pupil who is drifting. School email goes unread, a letter home reaches a parent rather than the pupil, and the school mobile is answered by whoever picks it up. So a pastoral lead trying to keep hold of a young person often ends up using their own number, doing the right thing with the wrong tool.
From September 2026, Keeping Children Safe in Education also expects schools in England to be phone-free during the school day. That sharpens rather than removes the point: this is not about pupils messaging in lessons. It is about staff coordination, and about the contact that happens when a pupil is not in front of you.
How Socialheads fits
For the staff team, it is group conversations with named members and clear roles, on the phones people already carry. The school owns the record rather than a departing colleague's handset, and admin controls end access the day someone leaves.
Where a school extends it to pupils, that is deliberate rather than automatic. Named staff are given a channel to the specific pupils they support, consent is recorded before anyone outside the staff team joins a conversation, and conversations are staff-led so a pupil cannot open a channel to an adult who has not been assigned to them.
Safeguarding Plus is also where a named parent or carer can be brought into a particular conversation, the same way a school might bring in an external professional. Not a mailing list, and not every parent: the specific adult who needs to be part of a specific conversation, with the same record and the same rules as everyone else in it.
Nobody hands out a personal number in either direction.
A pupil reaches it in a browser, which matters when they are out of school and may be on a family device, a library computer or nothing of their own.
Every message is recorded as it happens. When something in a conversation becomes a safeguarding concern, it goes in CPOMS or MyConcern where it belongs, and the conversation record is there to attach to it. Information sharing is easier when the information exists in a form you can actually hand over.
When pupil messaging is the wrong answer
The question worth asking is narrow: is there a group of pupils your team is struggling to stay in contact with, where staff are already using personal phones to do it?
The staff side is straightforward: if your team runs on a WhatsApp group, there is a problem worth solving. Opening a channel to pupils deserves more thought, and sometimes the right safeguarding decision is not to.
A pupil in school every day, whose relationships work face to face, does not need one, and adding it creates a record to manage for no gain. If nobody can say who is responsible for reading messages and when, settle that before choosing any tool, because an unanswered channel is worse than none. And it is not built to be every teacher to every pupil. It works where a named member of staff supports a named pupil.
Does this sit right with KCSIE?
Keeping Children Safe in Education is statutory guidance for schools and colleges in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own safeguarding frameworks. KCSIE 2026 applies from 1 September 2026, replacing the 2025 version.
What we can honestly say is narrow. Socialheads gives you a governed channel and a record of it. Whether your arrangements meet the guidance depends on your policies, your staff code of conduct, your designated safeguarding lead's judgement and your practice. That is yours, and it should be.
Your school is the data controller and we act as your processor. We will support your data protection impact assessment and provide the processing agreement, security overview and subprocessor list your review will ask for.
What changes for the pupil
A young person who has stopped coming in still has a way to reach the adult in school who knows them, without that adult's personal number being involved.
They are told plainly what is private and what a safeguarding lead may read. For a pupil already wary of school, knowing the rules in advance is the difference between using it and ignoring it.
And the record of what has been said stays with the school rather than one member of staff, so a change of tutor or pastoral lead does not mean starting over.
If you have a group of pupils your team is struggling to keep hold of, that is the conversation worth having.
Wondering what the lost time adds up to? Try the impact calculator.