Recently, our constant quest for building alliances for online safety took us to London. Our PhD candidate in the framework of the PARTICIPATE project, Luca Laszlo, is currently doing her non-academic secondment at the UK based organisation, Youthworks. For the first days of her stay, Eszter Salamon also joined her, and they enjoyed the hospitality of the wonderful Adrienne Katz together. Who did not only make them the most wonderful chocolate cake, but also set up many meetings. They met:
Liane Katz FRSA is the co-founder of MAMA.codes – Raising Digital Kids, a company teaching children (and their parents) coding and basic online safety from a very young age in a fun and accessible way. They are soon to launch an app that will make this available completely remotely. If you are interested in testing it, let us know!
Carmel Glassbrook works at SWGfL, operating a helpline for professionals working with children to support them with online safety issues.
Gary Thomas is the director of NYAS (National Youth Advocacy Service), a service for care-experienced young people in England and Wales that ensures their agency. They visited the Mumsnet office, a forum that provides a space for parents to discuss whatever they wish. That has a very strong policy influence. They visited the office of ParentZone, and learned about the work they do, and found that we agree on many things, and found a strong ally supporting parents and childrens rights in the digital space. They also submitted an abstract together for a paper, and set the foundations for the advocacy toolkit as described in the PARTICIPATE project.
A meeting was arranged with Ofcom, the UK media authority, too. Our team was informed in advance that it is forbidden to mention the current hot topic, the planned social media plan, and it made the meeting somewhat awkward. One of their tasks is to support media literacy and digital well-being, so they were interested in our collaboration with the Council of Europe having to information about their work on digital citizenship education, recent tools developed in the Sails, Democrat and Drone projects, and shocked by our research data from Drone, EFFEct and Participate.
Luca is supporting Adrienne with her project on the exploitation of young people online as part of her secondment.
More from Parent International
Bullying, Trust in Parents, and Digital Resilience
Empowering Parents: Understanding the Strong Impact of Adult Behaviour on Cyberbullying
Let’s Act Now: Reflections from the 2025 Digital Citizenship Education Forum in Strasbourg
