Ofcom has published guidance on Children’s Access Assessments, meaning that in-scope user-to-user and search service providers will have until 16 April 2025 to complete them.

Under the Online Safety Act 2023, regulated services must carry out a Children’s Access Assessment to determine whether their service is likely to be accessed by children. In order to do so, providers must follow a two-stage process.

The first stage is to assess whether children are normally able to access the service. This requires an interrogation of the operation and effectiveness of any age assurance mechanisms employed by the provider. We have commented elsewhere on these mechanisms here. In short, in order to conclude that their service will not normally be accessible by children, providers must employ ‘highly effective’ age assurance mechanisms that are reliable, fair, robust, and technically accurate.

In the Guidance, Ofcom confirms that if a provider has highly effective age assurance and effective access controls in place, it may conclude that it is not possible for children to access the service. The result is that the provider is outside the scope of the children’s protection duties and need not proceed any further in the assessment process than recording the outcome and evidence to support its conclusion.

If no highly effective age assurance is in place, Ofcom will conclude that children can access the service and the provider must move on to stage two of the risk assessment process to examine the so-called ‘child user condition’. This asks whether the service has a significant number of UK users who are children, or is of a kind that is likely to attract a significant number of UK users who are children.

The Guidance provides helpful information about how Ofcom will interpret the criteria of the child user condition, including setting out a number of factors that suggest that a service has, or is likely to attract, a significant number of child users. It also explains that what is meant by a ‘significant number’ is not defined in the statute and, as such, “what constitutes a significant number of children for the purposes of a children’s access assessment is likely to depend highly on the nature and context of your service, taking into account a number of factors and characteristics”. Ofcom advises that providers should “err on the side of caution” and states that a significant number of users who are children “means a number or proportion that is material in the nature and context” of a service, such that even a relatively small number of percentage could be ‘significant’.

As for the first part of the child user condition – namely whether the service has a significant number of UK users who are children – the Guidance states that providers should consider a range of factors, including: (1) whether children form part of the service’s commercial strategy; (2) evidence from internal sources (for example, reports relating to, or complaints about, users under 18, or evidence of the number of accounts that have been removed because users fall below the permitted age on the service); and (3) evidence from external and independent sources such as market research.

Assessing whether a service is of a kind likely to attract a significant number of UK users who are children is understandably a more complex exercise. The Guidance provides the following non-exhaustive list of indicative factors:

• Whether the service provides benefits to children;
• Whether the content on the service is appealing to children;
• Whether the design of the service is appealing to children (in terms of its colours, presentation, features and functionalities);
• Whether children form part of the business model, marketing strategy and growth plan;
• Evidence from internal sources (for example, reporting and complaints of users under 18 and statistics on the removal of accounts of users under 18); and
• Evidence from external and independent sources (for example, market research and quantitative evidence from third parties that track child media consumption).

The Guidance also includes helpful information about the timing of Children’s Access Assessments, what should happen if circumstances arise that trigger the need for a new assessment, as well as the format that assessments should adopt (complete with helpful case studies).

To read the Guidance in full, click here.