Keeping children connected, engaged, and debating at home

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed how children learned, interacted, and participated in society.

While schools rapidly adapted to remote learning, many opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and democratic participation disappeared overnight. Children from lower-income households were particularly vulnerable to becoming disconnected from educational and social experiences outside the classroom.

The Smart School Councils team wanted to address this challenge by bringing structured debates into people's homes.

The goal was to create an experience that felt educational, engaging, and accessible while encouraging children to explore different perspectives, discuss topical issues, and participate in collective decision-making.

Accessibility was central to every decision we made.

The platform needed to work on a wide range of devices and internet connections while remaining simple enough for both children and parents to use without support.

We began by mapping user journeys and wireframing the experience before creating a lightweight visual identity designed specifically for the platform.

The experience was intentionally straightforward. Users could join live debates, participate in discussions within their household, cast votes, and immediately see how opinions compared with those of other families across the country.

By reducing complexity wherever possible, we maximised participation and ensured the platform remained accessible to as many households as possible.

One of the most important aspects of the project was making the debates feel live and collective.

Inspired by the communal energy generated by online events during lockdown, we wanted participants to feel part of something bigger than their own household.

Using YouTube Live as the primary broadcast mechanism allowed us to focus development effort on the debate experience itself. Participants could follow live sessions, respond to prompts, cast votes, and receive real-time feedback as discussions progressed.

The platform also generated live results, showing how people across the country were responding to debate topics and creating a stronger sense of shared participation.

The platform's traffic patterns created an unusual technical challenge.

Most of the time, activity was relatively low. However, during live debates the number of concurrent users could increase dramatically, with every participant requiring regular updates as the debate progressed.

To support this, we explored several architectural approaches before selecting Amazon DynamoDB. The service provided a cost-effective and scalable solution capable of handling sudden spikes in activity without requiring significant infrastructure management.

This allowed the platform to remain responsive during live events while keeping running costs manageable for a charity-led initiative.

Not every family could attend every debate.

To support ongoing engagement, we created an archive of previous sessions that allowed users to revisit debates, catch up on topics they had missed, and access additional educational activities.

We also developed concise summaries of each debate, enabling users to understand key discussion points without needing to watch entire recordings.

This helped extend the value of the platform beyond live events and created a growing educational resource for families and schools.

Big Debate Club provided children and families with an engaging way to stay connected, continue learning, and participate in meaningful discussions during one of the most disruptive periods in recent history.

By combining live broadcasting, real-time voting, and accessible user journeys, the platform created opportunities for democratic participation that would otherwise have been lost during lockdown.

The project also demonstrated how digital tools can support educational outcomes while fostering confidence, critical thinking, and collaboration beyond the classroom.

What began as a response to COVID-19 became a foundation for a broader vision of accessible, family-led democratic learning.