Online safety

We recognise online safety is a major concern for all professionals. For information and support, staff will refer to the ‘information and support’ section of Annex D: Online safety KCSIE.

We believe it is essential that children are safeguarded from potentially harmful and inappropriate online material. We will take an effective whole setting approach to online safety to empower us to protect and educate our pupils, students, and staff in their use of technology.

The breadth of issues classified within online safety is considerable, but can be categorised into four areas of risk:

• content: being exposed to illegal, inappropriate or harmful content, for example: pornography, fake news, racism, misogyny, self-harm, suicide, anti-Semitism, radicalisation and extremism.
• contact: being subjected to harmful online interaction with other users; for example: peer to peer pressure, commercial advertising and adults posing as children or young adults with the intention to groom or exploit them for sexual, criminal, financial or other purposes’.
• conduct: personal online behaviour that increases the likelihood of, or causes, harm; for example, making, sending and receiving explicit images (e.g. consensual and non-consensual sharing of nudes and semi-nudes and/or pornography, sharing other explicit images and online bullying; and
• commerce: risks such as online gambling, inappropriate advertising, phishing and or financial scams. If we feel our pupils, students or staff are at risk, we will report it to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (https://apwg.org/).

We will ensure online safety is a running and interrelated theme whilst devising and implementing policies and procedures. This will include considering how online safety is reflected as required in all relevant policies and considering online safety whilst planning the curriculum, any teacher training, the role and responsibilities of the DSL and any parental engagement.

We take seriously our duties to assist parents and help them with on line safeguarding resources. As such, we will make them aware of relevant support services, including those listed on pages 151-152 of KCSIE 2021.

We accept that many children have unlimited and unrestricted access to the internet via mobile phone networks. This access means some children, whilst in our setting, sexually harass their peers via their mobile and smart technology, share indecent images: consensually and non-consensually, view, share pornography, and other harmful content. Our management of this in included in our mobile and smart technology policy. These incidents will be managed in line with our peer on peer procedures.  

Where children are being asked to learn online at home we will follow the advice to support schools and colleges do so safely: safeguarding in schools colleges and other providers and safeguarding and remote education. We recognise the NSPCC and PSHE Association also provide helpful advice.

Whilst considering our responsibility to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and provide them with a safe environment in which to learn, we will do all that we reasonably can to limit children’s exposure to risks from our IT system. We will ensure we have appropriate filters and monitoring systems in place. We will do this by considering the age range of our children, the number of children, how often they access the IT system and the proportionality of costs versus risks.

The appropriateness of our filters and monitoring systems have been informed in part, by the risk assessment required by the Prevent Duty.

We have the appropriate level of security protection in place, in order to safeguard our systems, staff and learners and we will review the effectiveness of these procedures periodically to keep up with evolving cyber-crime technologies.

We will carry out an annual review of our approach to online safety, supported by an annual risk assessment that considers and reflects the risks their children face.

Our governing body will question school leaders to gain a basic understanding of our approach to keeping children safe online; learn how to improve this approach where appropriate; and find out about tools, which can be used to improve the approach.

Mentors of trainee teachers and newly qualified teachers induct mentees and provide ongoing support, development and monitoring on online safety.

As a maintained/controlled school/college we adhere to The Corporate Information Security Policy (CISP) including Acceptable Use of Equipment and the Social Media Policy-Acceptable Use for Employees. We will make all aware of its existence and importance. Where appropriate, intervention will take place when anyone uses e-technology in an unacceptable fashion.

Please see our policy on the safe use of mobile and smart technology in the school.