Blog – Latest stories tagged 'e-safety'

Ideas and suggestions to help improve parental engagement in e-safety issues

When it comes to young people, we hear all too often that online safety is not just a matter for teachers to educate our pupils, but for parents to take responsibility and for the Internet providers to provide adequate protection at the source. While the latter is a cause that the government is positioned to handle, it still seems that schools are not only in charge of pupil education, but also getting parents up-to-speed too.

The challenge of engaging parents in matters of e-safety is perpetual. Here are E-safety Support we very often speak to schools who are struggling to get the message across to the parents – be that due to poor attendance at open evenings, or simply because it’s just easier for the parent to hand over the iPad to the child because they know how to use it better!

Empowering pupils

However, we also hear some great ideas from schools about how they are dealing with the issue – most recently from Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale. During a recent e-safety day, the school took the decision to empower the children in taking the Internet safety message home to their parents. The pupils completed the online parent training (available from E-safety Support) and then went on to developing posters and slides that they could share with their parents.

Dave Leonard, ICT Manager at Matthew Moss commented, "Having already distributed the ‘Get E-Smart’ pupil training to all students in KS3 we were looking for ways to reinforce the e-safety message to learners. One issue that we face, in common with many schools, is making parents and carers aware of the importance of e-safety. I discussed this with our Head of Family who was running the e-safety day and we decided to try to switch things around by asking learners to train their parents. We used the ‘E-safety Training for Parents’ course as the basis of our work with students and they produced resources and examples with which to facilitate discussions with their parents. The students enjoyed the sense of responsibility and it was a very effective way of ensuring that e-safety is considered at home as well as at school"

Other ideas for schools

Below are some other suggestions that could help engagement with parents at your school.

Parent assemblies - Have your pupils run an e-safety parents assembly – this could be quite powerful if the children themselves point out the risks that they need their parents to help protect them from. Prior to holding such an event, carry out an audit (one is available to E-safety Support Premium Plus members) to highlight key areas of concern, which can then be pinpointed within the session.

Homework books - If your pupils have homework books, perhaps a regular tip, news headline or similar could be included in that to keep the message getting out.

School events - Have an e-safety 'stall' at your next school fair. This could provide an opportunity for parents to have a chat about any concerns they may have or to simply be given more information in a less formal setting.

AUP - Have parents signed an acceptable use policy? Again, this is something you can download from E-safety Support and issue via email.

Pupil surveys - Carry out anonymous surveys of your pupils about time spent online, usage of social media, how they feel about cyberbullying etc and share these results with parents – they may be surprised by the findings.

Videos - If you are using videos from CEOP / NSPCC for example in the classroom, send the link to parents so they can watch it too

Dedicated web page - Make sure your website includes the name of the teacher responsible for e-safety. You could also include:

1. The e-safety news feed available to all E-safety Support members
   
2. A CEOP video - you could start with the one on the subject of grooming, but change it to other topical ones over time - CEOP have a bank of parent videos you could choose from
   
3. A link to your school e-safety policy
   
4. A link to live stats on web activity to demonstrate the enormity of it (eg http://www.internetlivestats.com/)
   
5. Links to the external parent resources such as Internet Matters, Parent Zone, Family Lives and so on
   
6. The 'Click CEOP' reporting button

If you have any suggestions that you would like to share with other teachers, please use the comment section below.

Images courtesy of the pupils at Matthew Moss High School

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Update 8th March 2022

Please note this is an old article. The top most image shown is of a poster designed by pupils several years ago. Since that time, many ages limits have been changed.


In general, for UK citizens most services currently require account holders to be over 13 years of age.

"Children under the age of 13 are not allowed to sign up to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube and those under 12 are barred from creating a Google account. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook [sic - since re-branded as 'Meta' ], has a minimum age of 16. Most social media companies rely on users self-declaring their age when they sign up."

Source: The Times May 13 2021 - Social media users face age check under new rules to protect children.

Thank you to our commenter "oollie" for prompting this update

A look back at the last five years of E-safety Support and a look forward to the future of safeguarding.

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.

We are delighted to have received so many entries for our SID2018 competition, supporting the Safer Internet Day 2018 theme, ‘Create, Connect and Share Respect: a better Internet starts with you’.

The competition generated some great Tweets. The judging was once again quite a challenge. However, we are now delighted to announce the winners.

Best Primary School Tweet

The winning entry in the Primary School category came in the form of a video from the pupils at Duneane Primary School

Our judges said, "The pupils have all got involved in the video and the catchy tune will help them to remember the key Internet safety messages they are delivering."

Kerrie Wilson, Duneane Principal added, "We are a small school in Co Antrim and all our children were involved in our internet safety rap. The children worked together to produce the lyrics and the actions to illustrate them. One of our teachers, Mrs Cuthbertson then added a touch of her musical flair! Lucky for us the PSNI were delivering a safer internet talk and happy to lend us their car. In line with the SID2018 mantra, we wanted to create something positive which promoted key safety messages. We hoped to connect to the world in a respectful way. What’s more the staff and children had such fun making it."

The entry from Walford Primary School was selected as Highly Commended in this category

Best Secondary School Tweet

The winning entry in the Secondary School category came from Felsted School

The internet is written in PEN NOT PENCIL

Our judges said, "This simple message is a clear reminder that information shared on the Internet is not temporary and removing unwanted messages or information is incredibly difficult."

Tina Oakley-Agar from Felsted School added, "As part of our Safer Internet Day at Felsted School, the year 9 students took up the challenge of writing a tip on how to keep safe on the Internet. There was some lively debate about how they use the Internet, their digital footprint and the risks involved. Finally, they thought about how to write a memorable tip suitable for tweeting."

The entry from Boswells School was selected as Highly Commended in this category

Thank you to everyone for getting involved in the competition. There were some fantastic entries and we would like to congratulate all the pupils and teachers who got involved. Well Done! All the entries can be found on Twitter @EsafetySuppport