Online Safety
Technology is an integral part of the lives of children both within school and in their lives outside school. Technologies and the internet provide numerous valuable educational benefits. It is crucial that children learn to balance the benefits offered by technology with a critical awareness of their own and other’s online behaviour, and develop effective strategies for staying safe and making a positive contribution online, this forms an important part of our curriculum.
Things you can do at home
Discussing online activity
It is important to talk regularly with your child about staying safe online.
The following websites contain further advice for starting the conversation with your child about staying safe online.
Setting up parental controls
Advice about setting up parental controls can be found at: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/parental-controls/
Online Safety Guides for Parents and Carers
Maintaining a knowledge of popular apps, games and platforms, what they do and potential safety risks enables us to have meaningful discussions with our children about their online activities.
The online safety guides below provide both platform specific guidance and general online safety advice with easy to follow information to support conversations between adults and children.
The NSPCC has developed ‘NetAware’, a guide to the most popular social networks, apps and games that children use. It provides information about age ratings, how to use the safety settings and how likely it is that a child could find inappropriate content. ‘NetAware’ can be found online at https://www.net-aware.org.uk/ or via the free NSPCC NetAware app.
The UK Safer Internet Centre have issued the following link for a Parents Guide to Technology.
The O2 NSPCC Online safety helpline is able to provide tailored advice about keeping children safe online and can help if you need support setting up parental controls, adjusting privacy settings, advice on social networks. Call free on 0808 800 5002.
Further advice and resources can be found at:
- https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/
- http://www.childnet.com/parents-and-carers
- https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/
- https://www.getsafeonline.org/safeguarding-children/
How to report a concern
CEOP (Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre) helps to keep children safe from sexual abuse and grooming online. They are able to help and give advice. You can also make a report directly to them if something has happened online which has made you feel unsafe, scared or worried. www.ceop.gov.uk.
Childline provides a free, private and confidential service for advice and support online and over the phone on 0800 1111.
Anonymously and confidentially report child sexual abuse content and non-photographic child sexual abuse images via the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) via https://report.iwf.org.uk/en.
You can report online terrorism related content to the police’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit at www.gov.uk/report-terrorism.
Online content which incites hatred on the grounds of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender can be reported to True Vision at www.report-it.org.uk.
Concerns can also be discussed with our Designated Safeguarding Lead, Philip Hyland.
