It's time to make X our ex!

Andy Churcher • September 10, 2024

 It's been a long time coming... we even took a break in 2022 after Elon Musk bought Twitter. But its increasingly clear that we’ve both grown apart from each other and we can no longer stay together.


Don’t get me wrong, from a safeguarding and online safety point of view, I cannot say with confidence that X is any worse than any of the other platforms. The only way social media platforms seem to be able to make the business model work is to avoid large workforces and rely on technology to moderate content. The online safety risks from inappropriate content are now well known. They also all seem committed to having some sort of encryption on their messaging services which, while apparently protecting our privacy, creates worrying space for abusers to communicate with each other and share abusive content.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing business in the 21st century without engaging with social media and so, at the moment at least, engaging with the market on these platforms is an uncomfortable necessity for many people working in safeguarding.


However, for Keep Governance and Safeguarding, our relationship with X has moved from uncomfortable to untenable. 

Keep Governance and Safeguarding operates to reduce the risk of abuse, neglect and exploitation through supporting strategic leaders and safeguarding managers, driving improvement in organisational safeguarding arrangements and creating ways to empower children and adults at risk.  Our work to deliver on this mission is guided by our values in which we commit to always being collaborative, knowledgeable, personable, thorough and respectful.


As recent actions have shown, it doesn’t seem that Elon Musk and X are working to similar values to ours and I feel increasingly uncomfortable using the platform.


Twitter had banned a number of far-right voices but these were lifted by Elon Musk after buying it. If it was just about championing free speech I am not sure I would have had a huge problem with this, but he has himself published provocative, disrespectful and ill-informed posts and commented on, and therefore promoted, some from these previously banned accounts. During the riots which for a week or so erupted in the UK following misinformation spread on social media about the awful murders of children in Stockport in August, Elon Musk shared posts which seem to have little or no basis in the truth. He also made provocative comments on other people’s posts, clearly intended to stoke fires rather than try contributing to a calming of the situation.

In one such example, which he later deleted, Elon Musk shared an image on X which promoted a conspiracy theory about the UK building "detainment camps" on the Falkland Islands for rioters as if it were a headline from the Daily Telegraph.

He is happy to share ill-informed, antagonistic and inaccurate views with over 197 million followers on X, and is at best agnostic about the consequences of these actions or, at worst, deliberately trying to stoke right-wing opinions to undermine otherwise stable democracies.


He has reposted numerous posts which personally attack the leadership in Brazil, a country trying to ban X, demonstrating a huge lack of respect for the legal processes of another country and undermining their leaders with his written attacks. In Australia, where the government are trying to regulate content on social media platforms, their eSafety Commissioner was attacked in posts by Elon Musk which led to her receiving a huge amount of online abuse including death threats.

He is also taking a group of major companies to court for boycotting X… surely it is the right of any company to decide what platforms they use to interact with the market.


For me, the real problem here is the hugely amplified voice of the owner of a platform. With a large amount of money, he has bought himself the ability to speak directly to many people, and his voice unfortunately reflects values which clearly do not align to those of Keep Governance and Safeguarding.


So, we will shortly stop posting our social media updates to X and will be adding Youtube to our suite of socials. I am grateful that as a company in most of our work we have the ability to choose who we work with.

By Andy Churcher March 21, 2025
The recently published DfE research report The link between attendance and attainment in an assessment year [1] outlines the significant benefits to schools and their pupils of improving attendance levels. I know that most schools are very proactive when it comes to supporting pupils to increase their attendance, and rightly so. Ofsted are interested in understanding this work during inspections with a recent report stating, “The school has addressed the significant challenges with pupils’ attendance and punctuality through effective actions to support and engage families.” But, of course, attendance isn’t the only factor impacting attainment in assessment. In fact, much research demonstrates that academic success measured by attainment is influenced by the whole life experience of the child. Ofsted’s 2022 paper Securing good attendance and tackling persistent absence [2] identified interdependencies between attendance and safeguarding. Effective and empathetic communication with parents is also an important tool in reducing absence. The same paper noted, “It is clear that leaders who have succeeded in raising attendance levels listen to parents properly and ask the right questions in order to find out why their children are not attending well enough.” There is also extensive research which helps us to understand the link between challenging behaviour and abuse, neglect and exploitation. The Truth Project, part of the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse [3], gathered the insight of more than 6,000 victims and survivors of child sexual abuse. In its report, IICSA noted that victims and survivors knew their behaviour deteriorated as a result of being sexually abused sometimes, but not exclusively, as a deliberate attempt to communicate that they needed help, although sadly these signals were rarely recognised by others. And if behaviour can influence attainment then, of course, so can being the victim of abuse. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s 2024 National review into child sexual abuse within the family environment [4] stated that “abuse was reported to have impacted children’s education in nearly a third of reviews”. And, if all that’s the case we can begin to see a complex mosaic of interdependencies for children which have the power to influence their risk of being a victim of abuse, their behaviour in school, their attainment throughout their education and their whole life experience. Safeguarding and wellbeing should never be seen as separate to any other part of a child’s experience. I wonder if school leaders take a truly strategic view of this mosaic which results in a co-ordinated approach which is greater than the sum of its parts. Or if work to support pupils is often too fragmented at an organisational level to be sufficiently effective in tackling these interdependencies. Last year the Department of Education published a rapid literature review [5] to shape the work of the longitudinal Education and Outcomes Panel Study (EOPS). It identified this mosaic of issues that impact educational outcomes categorising them into four themes: Theme 1: Children’s cognitive and non-cognitive capabilities and wellbeing Theme 2: Children with SEND and experience of social services Theme 3: Home environment Theme 4: Experiences of school
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