Online Safety and a Foster Child: What Actually Works

Most people thinking about fostering worry about this one. You can childproof a kitchen. You cannot childproof the internet, and a child who arrives with a phone in their pocket arrives with everything on it. Here is what the rules ask of you, which settings are worth an hour, and what to do on the day something goes wrong.

Please note: general information, not legal or personalised advice, correct at 9 September 2026. The rules for a particular child are the ones in their care plan. For what online services must now do, see Ofcom’s guidance on age checks, and for what adults should do about a shared image, see the UK Council for Internet Safety guidance on gov.uk.

The law changed. It has not done the job for you

Since 25 July 2025, under the Online Safety Act, sites hosting pornography have had to run proper age checks, and platforms judged medium or high risk have had to keep the worst material out of the feeds they push at children. A real change, and overdue. It is also not a babysitter. Ofcom asked 11 to 17-year-olds what they had run into online over four weeks at the end of 2025: 73% recalled at least one kind of harmful content, barely moved from the wave before the codes came in. An age check sits on the website, not on the child, and a free VPN gets round it in about a minute.

The other number should shape your evening. Only 1% of those children went looking for it. Thirty-five per cent met it in their own feed, scrolling, while the algorithm decided what came next. It changes the question you ask. Not “what were you searching for”, which sounds like an accusation and gets you nothing. More like “has anything weird turned up on your For You page lately”.

Start with the care plan, not the router

A child in foster care is not only your responsibility. Decisions about phones and who a child may speak to online are agreed with their social worker and written down, usually in the placement plan and in your own safer care policy. That agreement is where you start. Some of it feels oddly specific until you know the child’s history. There may be a family member the court has said should not be in touch, which is a rule about WhatsApp and Snapchat as much as about the front door, and location sharing undoes it in one tap. Ask who a child may contact online before the phone is handed over, not after. This is exactly the sort of thing your supervising social worker exists for, and it overlaps a lot with how family time with a child’s parents and family is arranged.

Your own posting counts too. Photographs of a child living with you do not go on your Facebook or your WhatsApp group, however proud you are of the school photo. That is not fussiness. For some children it is the difference between being found and not being found.

The settings worth an hour of your time

Filters are not safety. They are a delay, worth having with a nine-year-old and worth little with a determined fifteen-year-old. Do them anyway, once, properly:

• Turn on the content filter your broadband provider offers. It is in your online account, or one phone call away.
• Switch SafeSearch on in Google, and check it on the tablet as well as the laptop.
• Set up parental controls on each device, and remember a games console is a device. An Xbox or a PlayStation is online, with voice chat.
• Give the child their own login rather than sharing yours.
• Take your card details off the account. In-game currency is where the money goes.
• Use downtime and app limits so the WiFi is not on at 2am. Agree the times out loud, rather than making it a mystery.

Redo it when a child arrives and again as they get older. Ofcom found 56% of ten-year-olds have their own phone and 83% of eleven-year-olds do: a new school, a new uniform and a smartphone in the same fortnight.

Where the phone lives beats what you can see on it

Two rules do more work than any app. Screens live in shared rooms where you can wander past, and phones charge downstairs overnight. Boring, and it works, because it makes a child’s online life visible without making them feel watched.

Secret monitoring is a different matter, and we would leave it alone. Reading a teenager’s messages behind their back buys a week of information and costs the thing that keeps them safe, which is that they come and tell you. Say plainly what you check and why: that you see which apps are installed, that you will ask who someone is, that you are not reading their chat with their best friend. A child let down by adults before will test whether you meant it, which is the point of saying it out loud. There is more on how these conversations tend to land in our piece on talking with a child so it actually gets through, and on the practical side of life with an older child in fostering a teenager.

Nudes and sextortion: the rules for the bad day

This is the part carers dread, so know your lines before you need them. If a young person tells you they have sent a nude image, or that one is being passed around: do not ask to see it, do not forward it, and do not delete it or tell them to. Adults must not view or copy that imagery, and an adult sharing an image of an under-18 is child sexual abuse, reported to the police straight away. Tell your supervising social worker the same day, and tell the young person first that they are not in trouble with you.

There is a route to getting an image taken down. Report Remove, run by Childline and the Internet Watch Foundation, lets anyone under 18 in the UK report an image of themselves so it can be blocked across the industry. Childline counsellors will not see the picture, and the young person can ring 0800 1111 free at any point.

Sextortion is the version that catches families out. Someone posing as a girl the same age gets a boy to send a photo, then demands money within minutes. The National Crime Agency puts teenage boys aged 14 to 17 among those most targeted, and the offenders are usually organised gangs abroad. The advice is unglamorous: stop replying, block them, do not pay, keep the messages, and report to the police on 101, or 999 if the child is in danger. Paying does not end it. None of it is the young person’s fault, and a boy talked into it at midnight needs to hear that from you before anything else.

Bullying, and the stuff that just arrives

Cyberbullying follows a child home. Screenshot it, block the accounts, tell your supervising social worker, and be clear with the child that it was not their doing. Content that is nasty rather than illegal can be reported at reportharmfulcontent.com, run by SWGfL, which will chase a platform that ignores a report.

Most children still say nothing. In the same Ofcom research, 15% of those who met something harmful told an adult and 12% reported it to the platform. Nearly half scrolled past. A child’s mood after an hour on their phone is often better evidence than anything on the screen, and the thread from there to sleep and worry runs through our guide to helping a child manage anxiety.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody expects a foster carer to be a cybersecurity expert. Ten carers and ten social workers were interviewed for a UK study of online safety training published in November 2025, and the finding was that carers had rarely been given a course on it, with confidence rising sharply once they had. Small study, and it matches what we hear.

At GLF you get training that covers this, a supervising social worker who knows your household, out-of-hours support for the 11pm phone call, and other carers who have handled the same conversation. You are paid properly while you do it: 479.50 pounds a week for a child under 11 and 507.50 pounds for a child aged 11 or over, per child, with an enhanced fee of roughly 100 to 200 pounds a week more where a child needs a higher level of care. Ofsted inspected us in July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements. If you want the fuller picture of what surrounds a carer, see what support foster carers receive.

Frequently asked questions

Can a child in foster care have their own phone?

Usually yes. Taking a phone from a child who has just moved home removes the friends and family they have left, so the starting point is that they keep it, with boundaries agreed with their social worker. Where a child has been groomed or exploited online there may be tighter conditions for a while, decided together rather than by you alone.

Am I allowed to read their messages?

You can agree checks, and for a younger child that is normal parenting. Do it openly: say what you look at, how often, and why. Covert surveillance of an older child’s messages is rarely agreed and tends to end the honesty you rely on. If you think a child is being groomed, that is not a moment for detective work but a moment to ring your supervising social worker.

What if a child in my care is being groomed online?

Keep the messages, do not confront the person yourself, tell your supervising social worker immediately, and report to the police on 101, or 999 if the child is in immediate danger. Grooming and online sexual exploitation can also be reported to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection command at ceop.police.uk. Say nothing that makes the child feel they caused it: keeping them talking to you is what makes the next hour safer.

Do I need to be good with technology to foster?

No. It is completely normal to have questions about this, and most carers we approve arrive knowing less about Snapchat than the children do. What matters is staying calm when something goes wrong and picking up the phone. The technical part can be taught in an afternoon.