Teach Middle East Magazine Apr - Jun 2020 Issue 3 Volume 7 | Page 48

A moment with
A MOMENT WITH HENRY PLATT
A MOMENT WITH
HENRY PLATTEN
H
enry was born on The Wirral
in the North West of England
and grew up in Hawarden,
a village on the English/
Welsh border (famous for being the
home of Victorian Prime Minister Sir
William Gladstone and Michael Owen,
the footballer). He did his A-Levels at
Castel Alun High School and studied
Broadcast Journalism at Nottingham
Trent University, getting a 1st class
honours degree in 1997.
He has always shown a great interest in
the power of effective communications
and started working for the BBC as
a freelance radio journalist. Shortly
after leaving University, Henry was
headhunted to join a Public relations
(PR) company, and this introduced him
to corporate communications at the
time the internet was starting to take
shape. Working with clients including;
GlaxoSmithKline,
Kimberly-Clarke
and then later on moving in-house
to become Weightmans Solicitors
national head of PR and media, in
his mid-20s, he was getting deeper
experience in the rapidly evolving area
of digital communications.
At the age of 26, he decided to take all
that he had learned and practised, and
use it for social good. So, he left the
corporate world to become a police
officer. While to some, the decision on
the surface seemed a surreal decision,
close friends and family said it was an
obvious choice, with his direction on
right and wrong and will to always
help others and leave the world a safer
place than he found it. At the age of
27, he started his police career as a
student officer on foot patrol at 4 am
on a cold December night around
Chester.
Henry found being an officer enabled
him to use all his communication and
decision-making skills, to help to make
people safer. During his time in the
police force, he was seeing more and
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Term 3 Apr - Jun 2020
more cases and incidents involving
social media and young people as a
contributing factor. He successfully
became a Sergeant and benefited
from working closely with detectives
in specialist investigation teams,
including public protection and CID.
His experience in being a police officer
is now serving to keep students around
the world safe online with the creation
of GoBubble, a social media platform
for children. Let us take some time to
get to know Henry Platten better.
Who was your favourite
teacher, and why?
I had two. Gareth Roberts, my A
level media studies tutor and Gillian
Moore my University law lecturer and
personal tutor. Gareth opened my
eyes to the power of communication
as a force for good and crafting it in
a way that can simplistically deliver
maximum impact. Gillian, at a time
when the internet 1.0 was emerging,
helped me understand areas such
as slander, defamation and the role
the law plays in all communications.
My mother fell ill with Non-Hodgkin’s
Lymphoma in my first year at
university and passed away in my final
year before graduating. Gillian, with
my other tutors, wrote to mum on her
death bed to let her know how well
I was doing and what my predicted
grades were. This kindness touched
mum and our whole family.
Who or what inspired you to
start GoBubble?
As a Sergeant, seeing the social
media and digital safety incidents
dramatically increase in number, it
became clear to me that the problem
wasn’t going away and that something
was missing in trying to resolve the
situation, which the police wasn’t able
to provide. At the same time, my wife
Danielle and I wanted to start a family.
I felt blessed being the son of two
After the Bell
teachers (father headteacher at the
top high school in North Wales and
my mother, a biochemist turned KS2
STEM teacher) who had always been
there for me during my childhood. So,
I quit my promising police career to
start up a business helping to teach
children how to keep their friends safe,
called eCadets.
Almost ten years on, eCadets has
now benefited more than one million
children attending schools which run
the multi-award-winning programme.
The eCadets programme has been
recognised in Parliament for its success
in giving children the knowledge
to keep children safe. It’s also won a
place in the coveted EdTech 50 for
the last three years. By working with
so many schools, parents and children,
we became increasingly aware of just
how many children want to use social
media (78% of children), and how
this may put them at risk of seeing
bad content or being approached
by a stranger (24% of children have
been approached by an unknown
adult on social media). We wanted to
give parents, teachers and children a
safe social media experience and so
GoBubble was born.
Share two major challenges
that you faced when you
started. How did you
overcome them?
The two challenges we faced were
technical and awareness. There are
two main issues with social media
at its core - content and contact. In
addressing contact, we go through
schools. A school applies to join,
and we carry out security checks
before we let them into the full site.
Initially, they’re kept in a silo where
they can create users, groups and
content, however these can only
be seen by people inside that silo.
The main technical challenge was
content. There were no child-centred
moderation systems available which
we could place our faith in. Unlike other
solutions, we didn’t want to place the
burden of moderation onto teachers,
who already have very little time. So,
we spent four years building our own
content moderation system, powered
by artificial intelligence (AI), which
checks all content before it appears.