Safeguarding Statement
The Short Version
- Morechard minimises what children can input in the first place - there's no open-ended AI chat live in the product today.
- We built a teen AI chat feature, safety-tested it, and then deliberately chose not to launch it until we had a proper legal and safeguarding basis in place.
- Because there's currently no open-ended input surface, there's currently no automated disclosure-escalation pipeline - this document says so plainly rather than implying one exists.
Design-first safeguarding
The single biggest safeguarding decision in Morechard's design is one you won't see: what we chose not to build. Child profiles use nicknames only - no legal name, no date of birth, no photo is required. Free-text input from children is limited to short labels (e.g. naming a savings goal) rather than open conversation, which minimises the surface for a child to disclose something concerning through the app in the first place.
A feature we built, then held back
In mid-2026 we built "Teen Mentor Chat" - a free-text AI conversation feature for teenage users, complete with a safety pipeline and a full automated test suite. Before launch, we identified that a genuine crisis-detection pipeline (recognising and responding to a disclosure of self-harm or abuse) involves processing special-category data under UK GDPR Article 9, requires its own distinct legal basis separate from ordinary consent, and is very likely to require a formal Data Protection Impact Assessment before it can be relied upon safely.
Rather than ship a feature that could mishandle a genuine disclosure from a child, we shelved it. It remains built and tested, but switched off in production, pending a proper legal review of the consent and disclosure model. We'd rather tell a school "this doesn't exist yet" than let a DPO discover a gap in a live safeguarding pathway.
What this means today
Because there is no open-ended AI chat live in the product, there is currently no automated escalation pathway for a child disclosure made through the app - because there's no channel through which a child could make an open-ended disclosure in the first place. If a family situation raises a genuine safeguarding concern, that sits with the school's and parents' existing safeguarding processes, not with Morechard's software. We think it's more honest to say this plainly than to describe a capability we don't have.
Questions
If your school's designated safeguarding lead or DPO wants to discuss this further, email security@morechard.com.