Field Notes

entity

Childnet

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Childnet International is a UK children’s-online-safety charity, launched in 1995, whose stated mission is to work with others “to make the internet a great and safe place for children and young people.”1 It is one of the three partner organizations of the UK Safer Internet Centre, alongside the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and SWGfL, and in that role coordinates Safer Internet Day in the UK, which reaches millions of children each year.2 Its programs include the Digital Leaders scheme, which trains pupils as peer online-safety educators in their schools. The vault links Childnet primarily for its late-2025 research into children’s VPN use.

The VPN study

Young people’s use of VPNs, commissioned by Childnet and Nominet and carried out by Opinium, surveyed 2,018 UK children aged 8 to 17 and 2,000 parents and carers, both weighted to national representativeness, in field 1–12 November 2025 and published 1 December 2025.3 Its headline findings, as the study reports them:

  • 21% of children aged 8–17 have used a VPN, rising from 15% of 8- to 10-year-olds to 27% of 15- to 17-year-olds.
  • The most common reasons were staying safe online and protecting privacy (38%); 16% used a VPN to get around parental controls, and 16% to get around school Wi-Fi blocks.
  • 10% of child VPN users — a figure the report itself flags as indicative only — said they used VPNs to see things not meant for their age.
  • The widely reported mid-2025 spike in UK VPN use, attributed at the time to the Online Safety Act’s age-verification duties taking effect in July 2025, is not attributable to children: the share who started using a VPN in the preceding three months (23%) is consistent with the share who started a year earlier (21%).

Internet Matters published consistent findings from different methodology the same month, and Childnet’s CEO pointed to that convergence.4

How the vault uses it

The study sits beside the July 2026 DSIT/BMG circumvention study, which cites it as a companion dataset, and corroborates the Internet Matters Online Safety Act report’s pattern that children’s VPN use is privacy-led rather than age-check-driven. All three feed Age-verification circumvention services’s treatment of circumvention as mostly household-level and tool-free. Because the findings are self-reported survey data, the vault attributes them to the study rather than stating them as observed traffic.

  1. Childnet, Who we are, on the charity’s founding, mission, and Safer Internet Day role. ↩

  2. UK Safer Internet Centre, About, on the three-charity partnership and its 2011 establishment. ↩

  3. Young people’s use of VPNs (PDF), the full Opinium-conducted study. ↩

  4. Childnet’s publication blog post, 1 December 2025, summarizing the findings and the Internet Matters convergence. ↩

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