Where we started
Voop is a digital safeguarding solution for children in foster and residential care. An eSIM, an app on the young person's phone, and a platform where care teams set what each child can contact, access and do, tailored to their care plan.
There was no way to say: from 9pm, different rules. Settings applied all the time, and changing them meant an adult logging in and doing it.
So bedtime was done by hand. Guardians in the pilot described handing phones in at 20:30, taking devices off a child at night, and switching the router off at the wall.
The common thread isn't the phone. It's that a person has to do it, every night, and be the one who says no.
Guardians didn't ask to see more, they asked to step in less
Across four months of pilot feedback, guardians used the phrase "screen time" constantly. Read what they actually described and almost none of it is a daily allowance. It is a time of day when the phone should wind down.
The pattern underneath was sharper still. Every single request was for something automatic. Not one guardian asked to see more of what a child was doing at night.
"A rule you enforce yourself costs you something with the child every time you enforce it. A schedule doesn't. That's the whole feature, really."
— Nick Pasha-Gubbins, Co-founder and CTO
That is what shaped Bedtime. The phone winds down because that is what happens at that time, not because an adult walked in and took it.
What Bedtime does
You set it up once. Choose the nights it runs, choose when it starts and when it ends, and save. From then on the phone winds down at that time and comes back in the morning: apps, web access, calls and messages off, the alarm and emergency calls still working. Being reachable was the first thing guardians asked about, in every session, before we raised it.
A few things can stay on through it. The exceptions step lists apps already installed on that child's phone, so a child who falls asleep to music or a podcast still can. It is a short list on purpose, and it is their apps, not a catalogue of everything that exists.
Turning Bedtime off pauses it. Tonight is off, the schedule is still there, and switching it back on costs one tap. Nothing a guardian sets up has to be rebuilt.
Built for care
Mainstream parental control apps are built around a family, where the adults are constant and nobody has to prove who changed what. Care covers more ground than that: a foster carer with one eight year old, a residential home with twenty, a staff rota where the person who sets a rule isn't the person there at bedtime.
Designing for that changed two things. A schedule has to get out of the way in an incident, so if a child is reported missing, Bedtime pauses on its own and the phone goes back to normal settings, starting again by itself if the child is found inside the same window. And every change stays attributable, which is how the platform already works and matters more when the staff change at 8pm.
Testing it with the people who use it
Before any of it was built we put a working prototype in front of four guardians from Compass homes, covering foster care, residential and homes supporting learning disabilities.
The core held. Every one of them understood Bedtime as a whole-phone wind-down, told us what it would replace in their own evening, and read the on and off states correctly. One residential manager described setting it up as really, really easy.
One thing failed, and it was worth finding. Three of the four read the exceptions list as a generic list of popular apps, not the apps actually on that child's phone. We redesigned the step before launch.
"We thought it was obvious the list was the child's own apps. Three out of four people told us it wasn't. That's the point of testing. You find out what the design actually says, rather than what you meant it to say."
— Shaban Siddiq, Lead Product Designer
What's next
Bedtime is deliberately the first thing, not the whole thing. It answers the loudest ask with the least new machinery.
We've looked at what sits around it: delaying a start for a late night, the same idea pointed at the school day, limits on how much rather than just when. A schedule and a limit aren't the same tool. One takes a decision away from a child, the other hands some of it back and asks them to manage it, and guardians split evenly on which their children need. That's a reason to get it right rather than ship it fast.
What we'd like to be measured by came out of the testing sessions with Compass. A residential manager described what Bedtime could mean for her 15 year old: keeping his phone overnight, because the schedule does the asking instead of her. One fewer argument every night, and a bit more trust at the end of it.
