What this service is, and what it is not

A family registers and receives a three-word phrase and a set of pictograms. A child learns the phrase. If the child is separated from their family, any adult can enter the phrase and the child’s first name on this site, and every contact the family listed is messaged at once with the finder’s name, number and location.

The problem it addresses is narrow and specific: the delay is almost never in finding the child, it is in finding out who to call. ThreeSafe shortens that gap. That is the entire claim.

• Not supervision. Nothing here watches a child, and no family should supervise less because they have a phrase.
• Not location tracking. There is no device, no tag, no map and no position of any kind. We could not tell you where a child is if you asked.
• Not a replacement for your procedure. It sits alongside a venue’s lost-child procedure and shortens the tail of it. The first instruction in every piece of our copy, including on the finder’s own screen, is to find a member of staff.
• Not an emergency service. If a child is at risk of harm, the number is 999. We say so on the finder’s screen and in every alert message.
• Not a child identity system. We hold no readable name, age, photo or description of any child, so there is nothing here for anyone to obtain about a child.

A three-word phrase plus a first name is two weak factors, not a security system. Here is what that does and does not stop.

• It defeats someone who has the words but not the child. Overhearing a phrase, or reading it off a card, is not enough — a lookup also needs the first name the child answers to.
• It cannot defeat someone who is with the child. A person standing next to a child can simply ask their name. Nothing in a three-word system can change that, and we will not imply otherwise. What the system does in that case is create a record: the person must give their own name and working mobile number, and the attempt is logged.
• A phrase is only as private as the family keeps it. A phrase printed on a bag tag that faces outwards is a phrase in public. We ask families to treat it as they would a house key.
• Recall under stress is not yet evidenced. We have designed for it — concrete imageable words, pictograms, a parent-written sentence — but we have not yet run the study that shows how well a four-year-old recalls a phrase weeks later, in a crowd. Until we have, treat the recall claim as a design intention rather than a finding.

• Nothing fails closed. If the name check fails, the alert is still raised. It is marked as unconfirmed and the family is told so, in those words. A system that refuses to reunite a child because a nickname was not registered would be worse than no system.
• The finder learns nothing about the family. No name, no number, no address, not even how many contacts exist. Information flows one way: the finder gives theirs.
• The family always gets the finder’s details. A parent can ring the person standing with their child, and can pass that number to staff or to the police.
• Contacts confirm themselves before they are used. A number nobody has confirmed is never messaged, so a mistyped digit does not send a stranger the details of a lost child.
• Every lookup is logged, matched or not, so a pattern of probing is visible rather than invisible.
• A family can change its phrase. If a phrase is compromised, it can be reissued, up to five times before we ask the family to talk to us.

ThreeSafe is a supplementary tool. It does not discharge any duty under Keeping Children Safe in Education, your local safeguarding partnership arrangements, or your own lost-child procedure, and it should be referenced in those documents as an aid rather than a control.

What we can provide to support an assessment:

• this statement and the data protection material behind it;
• a description of exactly what a staff member sees and does;
• a timestamped record of every lookup made at your site, which is what you would show an inspector afterwards;
• a named person to contact during a pilot.

How ThreeSafe works for organisations

If you believe the service has been misused, or that a lookup was made by someone who should not have made it, tell us at safeguarding@threesafe.org. Include the date, the approximate time and the site, and we will check the log and respond within two working days.

If a child is at immediate risk, this address is the wrong route. Call 999.

We will cooperate with any police or local authority child protection enquiry, and we log every disclosure we make.