CDWF Accreditation: The Industry Standard for Children's Digital Wellbeing
A modular, evidence-based roadmap to demonstrate that your product is safe, responsible, and supportive of child development.
What is the CDWF Accreditation?
The Children’s Digital Wellbeing Framework (CDWF) Accreditation is a structured assessment for digital products and teams that create experiences for children. It is designed to help industry demonstrate that their products are:
- Safe, age-appropriate and responsible by design
- Supportive of children’s wellbeing, learning and development
- Transparent and trustworthy in their use of data, monetisation and AI
The accreditation was developed with child development specialists, safeguarding experts, technologists and industry practitioners. It aims to give product teams a clear, practical roadmap for building better digital products for children, while providing parents, educators and regulators with a trusted signal of quality.
There are two routes:
- Product accreditation – for specific content, apps, games or services
- Person/team accreditation – for individuals or teams who lead responsible, child-centred digital design in their organisations
What Does The Accreditation Look At?
The product route uses a modular workbook that assesses the product across several domains:
- Floor requirements (baseline safety and responsibility). These are “must-have” safeguards that any accredited product must meet. Questions cover:
- Reporting and blocking tools
- Data minimisation and privacy
- Avoidance of dark patterns and coercive UX
- Security, accessibility and representation
- Responsible metrics and commercial transparency
- Consent, age-assurance and session structure
- Evidence of stakeholder involvement (including children).
Any “No” on a floor requirement results in an automatic fail until remediated.
- Online guardrails (if the product includes social/networked features) This domain is only applied when relevant and looks at:
- Communication safety, blocking and reporting
- Moderation of user-generated content
- Profile privacy and location protection
- Guardian visibility and controls
- Age-related design Products are assessed against guidance aligned to the target age band (e.g. 0–2, 3–5, 6–9, 10–13, 13+). This covers:
- Agency and decision-making with appropriate guardrails
- Emotional safety and regulation support
- Digital literacy and awareness of persuasion/AI
- Balance with offline life
- Adult involvement and co-use
- Community norms and culture
- AI-specific risks and safeguards where applicable
- Activity-specific domains. Depending on what the product actually does, one or more of the following activity sheets are included in the overall score:
- Screen-based content (video/publishing)
- Solitary play
- Multiplayer
- Online communication
- Educational
- VR/AR
Each activity sheet contains criteria and weighted scores tailored to that mode of engagement.
- AI guardrails (if AI is present). When the product uses AI – for personalisation, tutoring, chat, or content generation – additional criteria are applied, including:
- Disclosure that the system is non-human
- Guardrails around emotional dependency and relational claims
- Cognitive safeguards (supporting effort rather than replacing it)
- Bias, accuracy and red-teaming expectations
- Hard fail register. Some conditions automatically disqualify a product, even if scores are high elsewhere (for example: deliberate targeting of children with harmful content, undisclosed high-risk data practices, or AI use that is incompatible with wellbeing).
How the scoring works
- Each domain uses 0–5 scoring on individual criteria, with different weights depending on importance.
- Domains have threshold scores (typically 60%) that must be met.
- The overall product needs to:
- Pass all floor requirements
- Have no hard fails
- Achieve at least 70% overall, with each included domain at or above its threshold
Accreditation may be tiered (e.g. “Accredited”, “Advanced”, “Exemplary”) depending on the final score and how many domains exceed their baseline thresholds.
What Is Expected From Product Teams?
To complete an accreditation, product teams are asked to:
- Identify the product’s primary activity type(s) and target age band(s).
- Provide basic product and version information.
- Complete the relevant workbook sheets (floor requirements, applicable activities, age-related design, online/AI guardrails as relevant).
- Provide evidence references (e.g. design documentation, policies, UX flows, moderated logs, test reports) against each criterion where required.
- Nominate a lead contact for follow-up queries and, if needed, walk through the product in a live demo or test environment.
The workbook is designed to be usable by a cross-functional team (product management, design, engineering, safeguarding/compliance). Smaller studios can still participate but may need to allocate time to documenting practices that previously lived informally in people’s heads.
What Does Industry Gain?
For organisations, CDWF Accreditation can:
- Provide a trusted external signal of quality and child-centred design.
- De-risk launches and compliance conversations by showing structured consideration of safety, privacy and wellbeing.
- Support internal alignment around shared standards instead of ad-hoc, team-by-team interpretations.
- Help identify concrete, prioritised improvements (where scores are lower or thresholds not met).
- Differentiate products in parent/educator channels, app stores, procurement frameworks, and partnership discussions.
For teams, the person/team route can:
- Recognise and formalise the role of child-centred design and safeguarding expertise.
- Support professional development pathways (e.g. “accredited practitioner” roles).
- Increase confidence when advising colleagues or interacting with external stakeholders.