What the Digital Education Awards shortlist means
The Digital Education Awards recognise outstanding digital education products across the UK and internationally. The 2025 awards attracted entries from across the EdTech sector — adult & child digital learning products, home learning products, digital language learning products, digital classroom aids and (our category) digital health & wellbeing products.
Being included on the shortlist alongside globally recognised EdTech companies and specialist learning platforms is meaningful recognition for a compliance-focused product built for a single, specific sector. It confirms that the safeguarding component of The Sentry’s platform — the mobile emergency protection tools, the 100% private & accessible, in-app reporting channel, the audit trail and activity log monitored by an admin — is substantive enough to stand alongside products built exclusively for the education sector.
A safety platform with an unexpected safeguarding reach
The Sentry was not built for schools. At its core, it is a personal safety and lone worker platform for the property sector, designed to protect estate and letting agency staff who work alone with members of the public, and to protect employers by providing evidence that they took reasonable steps to prevent harassment from occurring.
But the same features that make The Sentry effective for lone workers — real-time location awareness, a discreet panic alarm, and a private incident and concern reporting channel routed straight to an admin portal — translate directly into a safeguarding tool for schools operating beyond their own gates.
Schools are increasingly responsible for pupil welfare in out-of-school-settings: school trips, work experience placements, sports fixtures, and other activities that take place away from staff supervision on-site. The Sentry’s app and web portal allow schools to extend safeguarding into exactly these settings. Students carry the app on their own phone; any activity, incident, or concern they report is routed securely to the school’s admin portal, where it sits as a retrievable record if it is ever needed. For safeguarding leads responsible for large groups of students off-site, this gives a practical way of keeping a closer eye on pupil welfare than has previously been possible.
It is this crossover — not any original design intent for education — that the Digital Education Awards shortlist recognises. The Sentry remains built first and foremost for estate and letting agents; its safeguarding capability is a byproduct of strong lone worker technology, not a parallel product line.
Reporting that meets the moment
One feature translates particularly well into a school setting: the 100% private, 100% accessible reporting channel, available to students through the app on their own phone. This gives schools a reporting route that aligns with current obligations — the Worker Protection Act 2023’s proactive duty on sexual harassment, the whistleblowing protections under the Employment Rights Act 2025, and the EHRC’s 8-step guidance on preventing sexual harassment — and it is available to staff as well as students. A private, well-documented channel for raising concerns is exactly what these obligations are asking employers and institutions to put in place.
Where the comparison to a business compliance tool ends
The Sentry’s compliance documentation pack — the policy framework, risk assessment templates, and legislative mapping that accompany a business deployment — is built for employers to demonstrate that they have taken all reasonable steps to protect their staff. It is not, in its current form, designed around a school’s safeguarding obligations to pupils, and it isn’t the reason for the award recognition.
Where it is relevant is in relation to a school’s own staff: a school that used the compliance pack for its employees, in the same way an estate agency would, could use it to evidence compliance with the same employer obligations under the Worker Protection Act 2023 and Employment Rights Act 2025.
Either way, we’re proud that the safeguarding capability at the heart of The Sentry has been recognised in this way, and grateful to the Digital Education Awards for seeing the value it brings to schools and students beyond the sector we originally built it for.
Rebecca Evans is founder of The Sentry, specialising in UK employment law obligations and lone worker safety for the property sector.