A look back at the last five years of E-safety Support and a look forward to the future of safeguarding.
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Let’s head back to 2012. Internet usage was rocketing. Social media sites we’re leading this charge. 250 million photos were being uploaded onto Facebook. 175 million tweets we’re being shared. All of this daily...yes daily!
The dark side of the Internet was also rising. Links about sex we’re being shared 90 percent more than any other link. Childline had highlighted 4,507 cases of cyber bullying. It was reported that online bullying amongst youth is a global problem.
More pupils than ever we’re gaining access to technology, at an earlier age and being exposed to heightened online risk.
To safeguard pupils from the emergence of online risks, the Ofsted framework for school inspection was introduced in 2012, addressing e-safety provisions required by schools.
E-Safety Support launched in 2013 as one of the early pioneering platforms to introduce consistent e-safety practices nationally. Our purpose - to empower teachers with outstanding practices in ensuring pupils stay safe online and that inspection requirements could be delivered in a hassle-free manner.
Five years on we’ve stayed true to our purpose, strengthening our commitment to delivering quality and consistency in e-safety practices to the teaching community nationally (and indeed internationally). Our platform expertise and increasing engagement rates makes E-Safety Support one of the UK’s preferred partners for e-safety guidance and delivery.
To date, more than 118,000 training courses have been delivered through the E-Safety Support platform. Over 15,700 members leverage our expertise and insights on a regular basis.
Safeguarding the Future
Child protection and welfare needs are evolving. According to the NSPCC, a child contacts Childline every 25 seconds. Findings by Bentley, H.et al (2017) How safe are our children? go further to demonstrate the increasing nature of offline risks to children.Providing a holistic approach to protect children against both offline and online risks is vital. This is why we are launching Safeguarding Essentials, a comprehensive service for Safeguarding future generations.
Safeguarding Essentials will provide a comprehensive range of safeguarding resources including teacher training, classroom resources, policies, checklists and parent guides, to better equip schools in preventing and detecting current risks faced by children.
Our new service will be accessible anytime and anywhere, empowering teachers to have the latest knowledge at their fingertips to deliver outstanding safeguarding practices with ease.
Further information about the new resources will be coming soon. Existing E-safety Support members will be notified via your weekly email bulletin. If you are not already an E-safety Support member, you can register your interest in the new Safeguarding Essentials service.
The report states that the "findings reveal how central technology is to young people’s relationship and the many different platforms they are using to interact with each other. It also highlights both the positive and negative role that technology can play in young people’s relationships and that whilst they are proactively helping to build a better internet, they also want support from the adults in their lives to do so".
