Readiness is taught. So we teach it.

The RSHE guidance

Department for Education, published July 2025

Relationships, sex and health education must cover online harms, and the guidance became compulsory in schools on 1 September 2026. It names the areas schools must now teach, including deepfakes, misogynistic content, gambling and the harms of pornography.

Where we align: We teach first by construction: every module is mapped to this guidance line by line, and the mapping matrix is public on this site.

Where we differ: The guidance is mostly about protection from harm. We add the positive capability side: what a child should be able to do well, not only what they should avoid.

Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026

Statutory safeguarding guidance, in force 1 September 2026

Schools must address online risk through the four Cs of content, contact, conduct and commerce, and the 2026 edition names generative AI, deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Where we align: We adopt its risk spine verbatim, and the public mapping shows which module teaches each newly named risk.

Where we differ: KCSIE never hands responsibility to the child. We progressively do, because a sixteen year old with no practised judgement is the risk the guidance cannot reach.

Education for a Connected World

UK Council for Internet Safety framework

Eight strands of online life a child should understand, from self image to copyright, described age by age from 4 to 18.

Where we align: It is the skeleton of our whole scheme: 34 modules covering all eight strands, Reception to Year 13.

Where we differ: It is a framework, not lessons. We are the lessons.

Amy Orben and colleagues

MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge

Their 2022 Nature Communications study found age windows where social media use and lower life satisfaction are most closely linked: around 11 to 13 for girls, 14 to 15 for boys, and 19 for both. The work is correlational, the effects are small, and Orben herself says the causal evidence on smartphones and children remains limited.

Where we align: The windows are the strongest peer reviewed basis for staging readiness by age rather than switching it on at a birthday, and our KS3 timing leans on them.

Where we hold back: We never cite this work as proof that social media causes mental illness, because its authors say it shows no such thing. Where the evidence is unsettled, our pages say so.

Sander van der Linden

Social Decision-Making Lab, University of Cambridge

People resist manipulation best when they practise the techniques in weakened form first. His inoculation studies with Google Jigsaw, published in Science Advances, reached tens of millions through prebunking videos. Responding to the under 16 ban, he argued bans alone lack an evidence base and called for major investment in digital literacy, and Cambridge coverage describes him discussing a social media passport built on gradual, supervised exposure.

Where we align: Inoculation is exactly how our misinformation modules teach: meet the trick in the classroom before the feed serves it for real. And gradual, supervised, earned exposure is our passport thesis stated by a Cambridge lab.

Where we hold back: His passport is an idea discussed in public research commentary, not our product, and he has no connection to us. We simply built the thing the argument points at.

Andrew Przybylski and Pete Etchells

Oxford Internet Institute and Bath Spa University

The largest studies of teenage screen use found moderate use was not linked to harm, and both argue the useful question is not how much screen time but what it contains and what it displaces.

Where we align: Calibrated guidance over blanket rules is our first non negotiable: never a flat allow or deny, always a pathway.

Where we hold back: They would ask us to justify any specific age we stage a skill at, so every stage decision on this site says why it sits where it sits.

The school phones evidence, both sides

University of Birmingham 2025 and the Norwegian School of Economics 2024

The first worldwide study of school phone policies, in The Lancet Regional Health Europe, found restrictive policies alone were not associated with better wellbeing or attainment, and its authors called for comprehensive approaches reaching home as well as school. A Norwegian study found middle school phone bans did improve girls’ grades and cut bullying. Both are real findings and we cite both.

Where we align: Bans help inside the school gate. They do not build the judgement a child uses at home, at a friend’s house, and at sixteen. That gap is precisely what a taught curriculum fills.

Where we hold back: Neither study tested our curriculum. We claim the gap, not the cure.

Candice Odgers

Professor of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine

Writing in Nature, she warned that the claim phones are rewiring children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by the science, and that blame aimed at social media can distract from real causes.

Where we align: Her test is our editorial standard: nothing goes on these pages that could not be defended to her.

Where we hold back: She would challenge any implied claim that our programme improves mental health, so we never make one. The passport records preparation, never a health outcome.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health

The UK professional body for children’s doctors

Its screen time guidance found no evidence for a single safe or harmful threshold and recommends families negotiate screen use around each child’s needs, protecting sleep, activity and time together.

Where we align: Negotiated, child specific screen agreements are what our routines modules teach children to build with their families.

Where we hold back: The guidance predates the ban debate, so we cite it for the negotiation principle, not for any position on the ban.

Catherine Knibbs

UK child trauma psychotherapist and cyberpsychologist, author of Children, Technology and Healthy Development (2021) and Online Harms and Cybertrauma (2023)

In Tech Smart Parenting (2025) she argues that asking whether to ban screens is the wrong question, and that blanket rules a child experiences as unfair push the child away from the adults they most need. Her clinical teaching is that the adult’s first reaction to what a child has seen decides whether that child ever tells again, and that confiscating the device as punishment teaches children to hide harm rather than report it.

Where we align: That calm, no shame, no reflex confiscation response is written into our teacher scripts from the very first Reception lesson, and our help seeking strand exists so telling a grown up always stays safe.

The honest line: She is a therapist and safeguarding trainer with her own frame, and she has no connection to this product. We cite her published argument, nothing more.

Dr Becky Kennedy and Good Inside

Clinical psychologist, author of Good Inside

Sturdy leadership: the parent stays the calm, boundaried pilot of the plane, connection before correction, and a child’s hardest moments are the moments that most need a steady adult.

Where we align: The register DiGi speaks in, and the way our parent notes talk to families, are shaped by that language of sturdy, warm authority.

The honest line: Good Inside is a parenting philosophy, not a digital curriculum, and no affiliation exists. The framing is kinship, not endorsement.

Devorah Heitner

Author of Screenwise, PhD, Northwestern University

Children need mentoring more than monitoring in their digital lives: engaged adult guidance inside their digital world beats surveillance of it.

Where we align: Mentorship is the whole method here. We hold no pupil data and sell no surveillance, because a watched child is not a taught child.

The honest line: None worth the name. This is the closest published kin to how the product works.

Common Sense Media

The largest digital citizenship curriculum in the United States

Digital citizenship can and should be taught in schools, free at the point of use, from kindergarten up.

Where we align: We share the founding belief entirely: this is taught, not blocked. Their two decades of classroom material proved the category.

The honest line: Common Sense is built for American schools and carries no UK statutory mapping. We are built on the UK frameworks a head is inspected against, and we cite Common Sense as kinship, never as UK alignment.

The principles our lessons run on

Every lesson follows the principles of instruction Barak Rosenshine set out in 2012: review, small steps, worked examples, guided then independent practice, checks on every child. The same principles are summarised by Eton’s own teaching research centre and adopted across some of England’s largest school groups. Our six phase lesson is that research given a fixed, visible shape.

Retrieval first, every lesson

Each lesson opens with retrieval practice, the technique decades of research shows beats restudying for long term memory. Explicit, teacher led instruction of this kind is the method behind Michaela Community School, which recorded the highest Progress 8 score of any school in England three years running.

What the best systems do

Singapore builds Cyber Wellness into its national Character and Citizenship syllabus from primary school. Finland has taught media literacy across its curriculum since 2014, starting in early childhood, and ranks first in Europe for media literacy every year the index has run. Estonia makes digital competence one of eight key competences for every pupil. The world’s strongest systems treat this as curriculum, not as an assembly.

What the best private schools do

Eton hands its youngest boarders a simple Nokia instead of a smartphone, and pairs the restriction with structured digital education through its research centre. Alleyn’s in London collects phones in Years 7 to 11 and runs a taught Digital Academy alongside. The pattern at the top of the independent sector is restrict and teach, never restrict alone. This curriculum is the teach half, ready made.