A child safety app for schools that verifies rather than watches

What safety software for young children should actually do

Safety software for preschools goes wrong in one of two directions. It either promises surveillance — live tracking, camera access, a dot per child — or it promises nothing at all and leaves the gate running on a paper register and a WhatsApp group. The first is intrusive, and under the DPDP Act 2023 it is a pile of children's data you now have to justify holding. The second falls apart the first time two people remember a hand-off differently.

We took the third position. Every safety feature here answers a question after the event rather than watching during it.

None of those questions need a child to be tracked. All of them need a record made at the time, with a name and a timestamp on it. Attendance and consent entries go further: those are append-only in the database, so a correction is a new line rather than a quiet edit.

• Who collected this child, and at what time?
• Was the register reconciled before the gate closed?
• Which children stayed on for daycare, and who was still here at six?
• Who boarded the van this morning, and does that match who is in class?
• What happened, when, and which member of staff wrote it down?

Pickup: verified guardians, and a code that proves the hand-off

The Child Safety module holds the list of adults allowed to collect each child — parents, a grandparent, the driver, the aunt who does Wednesdays. Release runs against that list, not against whoever is standing at the gate looking confident.

The hand-off is confirmed with a one-time code, checked in the teacher's app before the child is released. It is an OTP, not a QR code. That distinction is worth stating plainly, because QR pickup is a common claim and a printed QR badge is only as private as the family group chat it was forwarded into. The code is stored hashed, so it exists to be checked, never to be read.

What the school is left with is the useful part: who collected whom, and when. The front desk can see it during the pickup hour, and it stays with the child afterwards. When a parent rings on Thursday to ask who took their daughter home on Monday, the answer is a lookup rather than a ring-around.

Attendance that is reconciled, and a daycare roll call that assumes nothing

Attendance is the safety feature nobody files under safety. A register marked at nine and never looked at again tells you who arrived. It does not tell you who is still in the building at four.

Teachers mark the class in one tap from the app, and the register is reconciled at the end of the day rather than left half-finished. Hand-offs are recorded against the child alongside the register, so the two can be read side by side at the end of the day rather than reconstructed the following morning. Reading them together is still a person's job — the software keeps both records, it does not raise the discrepancy for you.

Daycare is where this matters most, because the risk changes shape: morning chaos is loud, and afternoon assumption is quiet. Extended hours get their own roll call in the Daycare module, so an after-school child is explicitly on a list for those hours rather than presumed to be around because she was there at lunch. Staff coming on at four inherit a list, not a memory.

Transport: who boarded, and what we are not claiming

The Transport module carries routes, stops and boarding, and the front desk can see who boarded which route this morning. That is the record to read next to the classroom register: a child who boarded the van should also be marked present in the room. Comparing the two is the front desk's job today — Transport records the boarding, it does not flag the mismatch for you.

Now the honest part. There is no live GPS map, no vehicle location for parents, and no alert when a bus nears a stop. Plenty of vendors sell that. We have not built it, and we are not going to imply otherwise. What exists is a boarding record the school can reconcile against attendance. If live tracking is your deciding factor, we would rather you knew that during the demo than after the invoice.

Incidents: written down at the time, kept with the child

A bumped head at eleven becomes a conversation at five, and the gap between the two is where preschools come unstuck. The Child Safety module carries an incident trail: what happened, when, and which member of staff recorded it — written near the moment rather than reconstructed once a parent asks.

Incidents are recorded against the child rather than scattered across four notebooks, so the second bump is filed in the same place as the first rather than in somebody else's memory. Student 360 gives one page per child — attendance, notes, health, fees, progress — and open incidents roll up onto the admin dashboard, so an owner sees the count without canvassing three teachers.

Attendance and consent records are append-only by design: corrections are added as new entries rather than edits to old ones, enforced in the database rather than by convention. The incident trail is an ordinary record carrying an author and a timestamp — we have not built the same append-only guarantee around it, and we are not going to imply we have.

Who can see any of it

A safety record is only as good as the access control around it. Roles decide what opens: a class teacher gets their own classes, not the fee ledger and not another room's health notes. Parents are on the mobile app only — their own child, with nowhere to land that is not theirs.

Underneath, every school's records are walled off from every other school's inside the database itself, using Postgres row-level security that fails closed. A request that has not established which school it belongs to returns nothing, rather than everything.

On children's data specifically, consent is recorded in an append-only ledger, and a photo is checked against that ledger before it reaches a parent. That is the shape the DPDP Act 2023 asks for: verifiable guardian consent, recorded, and demonstrable later rather than asserted. What we do not have is a certification — no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, nothing equivalent. If your group requires one, we are not there yet, and we will say so rather than let you find out in procurement.

Questions schools ask

Is this surveillance? Do you track children's location?

No. There is no camera integration, no location on a child and no live map. Child Safety verifies hand-offs and records incidents, Attendance and Daycare keep the roll call honest, and Transport records who boarded. Every one of those is a record made by a member of staff about something that has already happened — not a watch kept on a two-year-old.

Is pickup verified with a QR code?

No. It is a one-time code (OTP), checked in the teacher's app before the child is released, and stored hashed rather than in readable form. We are specific about this because QR pickup is widely advertised, and a printed QR badge is only as private as the family chat it gets forwarded into.

What if the adult collecting has no smartphone?

The check happens in the teacher's app, not on the collecting adult's phone. Release still runs against that child's list of authorised guardians, and the hand-off is recorded with a name and a time. How the code reaches the person collecting is worth walking through in the demo, so you can see whether it fits the families at your gate. Release still runs against that child's list of authorised guardians, and the hand-off is recorded with a name and a time either way.

Can we look up who collected a child three weeks ago?

Yes. Hand-offs are recorded against the child, so the question is a lookup rather than a ring-around. How long that record is kept follows your school's own retention policy. We hold records for as long as your subscription runs, because they are your school's working records, and if you tell us to delete one sooner, we delete it.

Do parents get a notification the moment their child is collected?

Not a push alert. Our push sender is not live yet, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a notification that never arrives. What exists today is the record: the school can answer who collected whom and when, and parents follow their child's day, attendance and updates in the app.

Does bus tracking come with it?

Not live tracking. Transport covers routes, stops and boarding, visible to the front desk — enough to reconcile the van against the classroom register. There is no GPS map and no arrival alert. If a parent-facing bus map is the deciding factor for your school, we are the wrong fit today.

Is child safety on a higher plan?

No. The plans differ only in how many children they cover, and every one, from ₹9,000 a year plus 18% GST, includes all eighteen modules — Child Safety, Attendance, Daycare, Transport and the rest. No setup fee, and the first month is free while we set your school up. Charging extra for the parts that protect children was never a pricing model we were willing to run.

Does using this make our preschool DPDP compliant?

It does the software half. Consent is recorded in an append-only ledger, photos pass a consent check before they are shared, access follows the role, and we delete a record sooner when your school instructs us to. The other half is yours: verifiable consent from a parent or lawful guardian, written agreements with the contractors who touch children's data, and a named person to answer when a parent asks. The readiness check walks you through where you stand in about five minutes.

Read next

• all eighteen modules, and what each one does
• the teacher and parent apps
• how children's records are kept apart — and what we do not claim
• the five-minute DPDP readiness check
• plans from ₹9,000 a year, every module included
• The DPDP Act for Indian preschools
• questions worth asking any preschool software vendor
• book a demo and see the pickup flow