Company: Natterhub
Founder(s): Manjit Sareen and Caroline Allams
Website: https://natterhub.com/
Description: Natterhub is a gated, educational social media platform for primary schools.
Packed with over 300 interactive lessons on digital literacy, Natterhub teaches critical skills for children who need to be safe and savvy in their blended lives. With an easy to use tracking and assessment system, teachers can easily see how pupils are building the necessary digital resilience to thrive in a digital landscape.
Underpinning Natterhub’s mission is the drive to teach pupils to be safe, kind digital citizens and their holistic solution provides children with the education that comes before children get their first personal device.
After four years of research and product development, Natterhub launched, for free, in April 2020 during the first lockdown as a way for pupils to stay connected with their peers. Although designed for classroom use, the Natterhub team needed to react and quickly adapt the tool to suit the needs of schools providing remote learning for pupils.
With teachers suddenly overloaded with a whole raft of new expectations, Natterhub realised that teaching online safety was not at the top of their priorities. Even though there has never been a more timely opportunity for pupils to have access to high quality, impactful digital literacy lessons, teachers were busy firefighting other issues.
In response to this and in order to provide pupils with the help and support they need to develop keen critical thinking skills and digital literacy skills, Natterhub developed a whole new set of 96, 25 minute sessions with animated teachers to guide the pupils through interactive lessons, removing the burden from teachers and upskilling pupils’ digital defence system!
During Natterhub’s research, the startup noted that parents frequently feel out of their depth when it comes to online issues; platforms and games rapidly evolve and change so safeguarding mechanisms quickly date. Natterhub is building a Parent Login section to the tool so they can see the progress their child is making across their digital journey with Natterhub. The startup are including bite-sized information for all major platforms plus a ratings system for popular YouTubers and games.
Results from over 100 questions have been collated and analysed to create a distinctive set of data from children aged 5-11; the first of its kind. Data has been collected from anonymous polls in Natterhub’s interactive lessons. The report due out in May, will outline a unique insight into children’s experiences of being online.
Frequently described as a zeitgeist product, Natterhub has already had traction in over 4000 schools in 60 countries around the world.
Natterhub was chosen to be the lead sponsor at the NSPCC How Safe 2021 annual conference and have been invited several times to speak at Westminster Education forum on Online Safety issues.
Natterhub know that online vulnerability is a global issue and the library of lessons they have created have, in such a short space of time, has garnered interest from teachers around the world who support the startup’s mission to teach children to approach the internet with kindness, empathy, resilience and critical thinking – skills that will last them a lifetime.
