A small British company building one thing properly
Signal 7 makes a lockdown alert system for UK schools, and nothing else. We are small, we are new, and we would rather tell you what the software does not do yet than find out together on the day it matters.
A lockdown should be faster, calmer and clearer than it usually is
In most schools a lockdown starts with a decision made in a few seconds and then travels by whatever is to hand: a phone tree, a runner down a corridor, a shout across a hall, a group chat. Every one of those routes is slow, and every one of them asks the person receiving it to work out what is happening and what to do.
Signal 7 exists to take that part out. One person with authority makes the decision. Every screen running the Signal 7 client changes at once, shows the same instruction, and staff confirm they have it. The dashboard counts those confirmations as they arrive, so the person in charge can see where the message has landed instead of guessing.
That is the whole ambition. Not a platform, not a suite — the few minutes between a decision and a calm classroom, made shorter and less uncertain.
No law requires a lockdown system. The duty is yours, and it is real
No UK law requires a school to have a lockdown system. The Department for Education's guidance on protective security for education settings is non-statutory — its verbs are "should consider" — and the fire industry's own guidance records that there are no official regulations covering invacuations.
What does exist is older and broader. Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must establish procedures to be followed in the event of serious and imminent danger to people at work. That duty is yours already. Signal 7 is one way to operate a procedure you need anyway — it is not the procedure, and it does not discharge the duty for you.
The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 — Martyn's Law — received Royal Assent in April 2025 and puts primary and secondary schools in scope as standard duty premises. It mandates procedures, not products. No supplier can make a school compliant with it, including us, and we print no commencement date because no regulations have been laid.
Three rules we do not bend
They are not a mission statement. They are the three decisions that settle most arguments inside this company before they start.
Safety first, including from us
This is software a school may only ever use once, on the worst morning it has. So nothing ships because it is nearly ready. A release needs its tests passing and the directors' sign-off, and a known defect is written down in public before it is explained away.
On your network, not ours
The server sits in your school, on your own network. In the on-premises install there is no cloud component at run time and no alert data leaves your site. Signal 7 holds no pupil records and has no link to your MIS. The one limit on that, which we would rather say first: the alert message and the operator's note are free text, so do not type a pupil's name into them. The installer does currently need internet access from the school server, and backups, patching and accounts are the school's job — so that is written here rather than discovered later.
Honest, and checkable
There is no standard and no certification scheme for lockdown alerting systems. Nobody can certify us — and nobody can certify anyone else either, whatever a badge on a website suggests. So we do not wear badges. Every claim on this site is written against the evidence behind it, and where the true answer is unflattering, we print the unflattering one.
Who you would actually be dealing with
Signal 7 has two directors. If you email us, one of them reads it. There is no switchboard and no sales floor, which is a fair thing to know before you start.
-
Christopher Jordan BSc, MSc
DirectorChristopher is a director of Signal 7 and one of the two people who sign off a release.
-
Kemuel Spence BMus, MMus
DirectorKemuel is a director of Signal 7 and one of the two people who sign off a release.
We are looking for our first schools
We have no case studies, no customer logos and no "trusted by" number, because we have not earned them yet. You will not find an invented one on this site. What we have is a working product, the evidence behind every sentence on these pages, and the time to give a school that takes a chance on us far more attention than a larger supplier would.
We will also tell you where the system stops. Signal 7 alerts the Windows PCs and laptops on your site. For staff away from a screen — catering, the site team, an outdoor lesson — you will need another route, and your lockdown plan should say what it is. An iPhone and Android app is committed and on the roadmap, but nothing is built yet and we will not give you a date for it.
Every question schools ask us — including the ones where the answer is no.
The four sentences you will never read here
- "Martyn's Law compliant." No product can be. The Act sets duties for premises, not a bar that software can clear on your behalf.
- "Ofsted expects it", or "required under KCSIE". Neither document contains the word "lockdown".
- "Certified", "accredited", "approved". There is no scheme to be certified by.
- "Independently tested", or any number of schools. Not yet true, so not yet written.
Talk to one of us
A short demo of the dashboard, the classroom alert and a full stand-down — and the hard questions answered first, not last. It goes straight to a director.