Keeping Children Safe in Education
Please find below a section regarding online safety. Please click the links which will direct you to useful websites.
The use of technology has become a significant component of many safeguarding
issues. Child sexual exploitation; radicalisation; sexual predation: technology often
provides the platform that facilitates harm. An effective approach to online safety
empowers a school or college to protect and educate the whole school or college
community in their use of technology and establishes mechanisms to identify,
intervene in, and escalate any incident where appropriate.
The breadth of issues classified within online safety is considerable, but can be
categorised into three areas of risk:
• content: being exposed to illegal, inappropriate or harmful material; for example
pornography, fake news, racist or radical and extremist views;
• contact: being subjected to harmful online interaction with other users; for
example commercial advertising as well as adults posing as children or young
adults; and
• conduct: personal online behaviour that increases the likelihood of, or causes,
harm; for example making, sending and receiving explicit images, or online
bullying.
Education
Opportunities to teach safeguarding, including online safety, are discussed at paragraph
88-90. Resources that could support schools and colleges include:
• Be Internet Legends developed by Parent Zone and Google is a free internet
safety curriculum with PSHE accredited lesson plans and teaching resources for
Key Stage 2 pupils
• Disrespectnobody is Home Office advice and includes resources on healthy
relationships, including sexting and pornography
• Education for a connected world framework from the UK Council for Internet
Safety supports the development of the curriculum and is of particular relevance to
RSHE education and Computing. It is designed, however, to be usable across the
curriculum and beyond (covering early years through to age 18) and to be central
to a whole school or college approach to safeguarding and online safety.
• PSHE association provides guidance to schools on developing their PSHE
curriculum
• Teaching online safety in school is departmental guidance outlining how schools
can ensure their pupils understand how to stay safe and behave online as part of
existing curriculum requirements
• Thinkuknow is the National Crime Agency/CEOPs education programme with age
specific resources
• UK Safer Internet Centre developed guidance and resources that can help with
the teaching of the online safety component of the Computing Curriculum.
Protecting children
Governing bodies and proprietors should be doing all that they reasonably can to limit
children’s exposure to the above risks from the school’s or college’s IT system. As part
of this process, governing bodies and proprietors should ensure their school or college
has appropriate filters and monitoring systems in place.
Whilst considering their responsibility to safeguard and promote the welfare of
children, and provide them with a safe environment in which to learn, governing bodies
and proprietors should consider the age range of their pupils, the number of pupils,
how often they access the IT system and the proportionality of costs vs risks.
The appropriateness of any filters and monitoring systems are a matter for individual
schools and colleges and will be informed in part, by the risk assessment required by
the Prevent Duty. The UK Safer Internet Centre has published guidance as to what
“appropriate” filtering and monitoring might look like: UK Safer Internet Centre:
appropriate filtering and monitoring.
Guidance on e-security is available from the National Education Network. Support for
schools is available via the: schools’ buying strategy with specific advice on
procurement here: buying for schools.
Whilst filtering and monitoring is an important part of the online safety picture for
schools and colleges to consider, it is only one part. Governors and proprietors should
consider a whole school or college approach to online safety. This will include a clear
policy on the use of mobile technology in the school or college. Many children have
unlimited and unrestricted access to the internet via 3G, 4G and 5G in particular and
the school and college should carefully consider how this is managed on their
premises.
Whilst it is essential that governing bodies and proprietors ensure that appropriate
filters and monitoring systems are in place, they should be careful that “over blocking”
does not lead to unreasonable restrictions as to what children can be taught with
regard to online teaching and safeguarding.
Please click the links below for useful tips on how to keep your children safe online whilst working from home:
8 Steps to keep your child safe
Supporting young people online
Please click to link below to see the expectations from parents when their child is remote learning:
Expectations from Parents/Carers
Click the link below for a routine guide
Routine guide for children working from home
