Blog – Latest stories tagged 'ofsted'

Just before the summer break, Ofsted published a new, and rather reduced set of inspection guidelines, which took away a great deal of published guidance about good and outstanding practice across a number of safeguarding areas. It also sparked rumours that e-safety was now largely off the Ofsted inspection radar.

In order to shed some light on the current situation, we turned the E-safety Officer for Kent County Council and regarded contributor to the UK Safer Internet community, Rebecca Avery. She suggests that if anything, there is a renewed focus on the importance of integrating online safety into a school’s wider safeguarding agenda.

Here is just a snapshot of the comments made on the matter in a recent article by Rebecca. Click on the links below to read the article in full.

E-safety within the Ofsted School Inspection Framework
A range of e-safety concerns that schools will need to consider and address are highlighted within Keeping Children Safe in Education under “specific safeguarding concerns” including child sexual exploitation, bullying including cyber bullying, radicalisation and sexting. Schools (specifically leader, managers, governing bodies and proprietors) should therefore ensure that e-safety messages are embedded throughout the school’s curriculum to ensure that pupils are prepared for life in modern Britain and the wider world.

Prior to an inspection Schools can demonstrate that e-safety is an important and established issue as part of their safeguarding responsibilities by ensuring that their school website (and other online communication channels) has up-to-date and appropriate information and guidance for parents/carers and children regarding online safety at school and at home.

During the inspection, inspectors will request that certain information is made available, such as any self-evaluation and the school improvement plan. They may also wish to see incident logs including actions taken as well as identifying a designated person who is responsible for e-safety concerns in the school. The inspectors will also gather evidence from pupils about cyber bullying and online safety education and behaviour in school.

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E-safety within “Inspecting Safeguarding”
The September 2014 safeguarding briefing identifies that schools should be safe environments for children and young people to learn and that inspectors should consider how well leaders and managers create and promote a safe culture within settings which will include vigilance and timely and appropriate action when children may be at risk of harm. Today’s children live in a world where the online environment has become seamlessly embedded into everyday life and this must therefore be acknowledged by schools.

When inspectors are considering and evaluating the effectiveness of safeguarding within schools and settings, many points will include e-safety practice. They may include:

Effectiveness of Safeguarding Arrangements

Leadership and management

Behaviour and Safety

E-safety should therefore be embedded throughout school safeguarding practice and be clearly identified as an issue for leaders and mangers to consider and address. Online safety is an essential element schools safeguarding responsibilities and should be considered to be a key priority for all members of staff. The e-safety agenda has shifted towards enabling children to manage risk, rather than filtering/blocking and therefore requires a comprehensive and embedded curriculum which is adapted specifically to the needs and requirements of pupils and the technology with which they are exposed too.

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We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences of e-safety inspections in you school – please let us know by using the comments section below.

Since the inclusion of e-safety in the section 5 inspection briefing, schools now risk missing Ofsted outstanding ratings due to poor e-safety strategy.

With indicators of inadequate e-safety provision including a lack of staff training, stating that “staff training is consistently the weakest area of a schools online safety provision”, along with no planned curriculum content amongst others, it is clear that Ofsted are looking for schools to see e-safety as a whole school issue.

To find out how your school would fair against the Ofsted standards considered outstanding or inadequate, start by asking yourself these 5 questions.

How would your school respond?

Following an inspection audit, St Wilfrid's School's Digital Leaders teacher (and E-safety Support Premium Plus member) commented:

The e-safety part of the review left the inspector with no matters for concern or improvement; she said that ‘we didn’t seem to realise how good we actually were as a school’. She loved our parental engagement ideas and other things that I have in the pipeline. In the final report she wrote against the ‘E-safety’ section that we ‘exceeded Ofsted e-Safety requirements by far’ and the last word was ‘Congratulations’. We’ve obviously done some good work, but thanks and congratulations should go in part to your good selves also.

We would love to hear how your school would respond to the Ofsted 5 question - Complete our anonymous 5 e-safety questions survey to let us know.

This is the fourth and final of a series of articles looking at the demands of the Ofsted’s e-safety framework first published to inspectors in September 2012. The document has since seen a number of amendments, the latest of which was in April 2014.

In the last post, we focused at two areas of the framework policy document; Policies and Education. In this last blog we are going to look at the final two areas for consideration, those being Infrastructure and Monitoring & Evaluation.

Infrastructure

This part of the Ofsted e-safety framework concentrates on the aspects concerning the facilities, duties and responsibilities with regard to the school’s IT infrastructure.

In order to demonstrate good or outstanding practice with regard to e-safety, Ofsted will be looking to see if the school’s IT infrastructure meets a number of requirements:

The school’s infrastructure includes a ‘Recognised Internet Service Provider’ or Regional Broadband Consortium’.

The school has age-related filtering in place and that the filtering allows choice with regard to what staff and students can access and when that access is allowed.

- Schools should have in place a web traffic monitoring tool such as the one supplied by SWGfL
- It is advisable that a school should analyse their web traffic at the very least once a month, preferably more often.

The filtering is pro-actively monitored in order that inappropriate sites that come to the attention of staff can be actively filtered.

When considering whether a site should be unfiltered, a number of questions should be asked of the web site:
1. Are there clear reasons, associated with the school curriculum, for the site to become unfiltered?
2. Is there any contentious content contained within the website?
3. When logging on to the site, do users have to register?
4. If, by allowing access, it could appear that the school is endorsing the site, does this create any problems?
5. Are there any age-restrictions stated on the web site?
6. If it is a site where students could upload content to it, what is the situation with regard to ownership of such material?
7. If students can upload content to it, who can view the material?
8. Are there any facilities for social-networking on the site that allows users to communicate?
9. If this is a site is unfiltered so that students could use it outside of school hours, are there any issues with unsupervised access?
10. Is there any evidence or content to suggest that the website has been created by a reliable organisation?

When checking sites, it is doubtful that all the questions above would be answered positively and so schools would have to employ their own judgement as to whether the benefits of using the site outweigh any issues.

Monitoring and Evaluation

This section of the Ofsted framework focuses on how e-safety in the school is formally and professionally monitored and evaluated. With regard to good or outstanding practice, Ofsted is looking for certain aspects to be demonstrated:

Whether the e-safety risk assessment is taken seriously within the school.

- An example of this could be in the context of social networking, where the risk is foreseen that some situation could occur identified and a process put in place to alleviate it.
- The use of monitoring software can help identify potential e-safety risks.

That the risk assessment is used to good affect to promote excellent e-safety practice both within and outside of the school environment.

- There is a common misconception that the stories in the media of students getting into problematic situations when using technology won’t occur in our schools, unfortunately this is just a case of ‘burying our heads in the sand’. Good or outstanding practice demands that risk should to be comprehensively identified by schools and mitigation processes implemented (if it can be) to deal with it.
- All risk assessment and mitigation processes should be immersed in policy, it is suggested that there should be documented evidence of this, for example it could be recorded that risk assessment drove the identification of training requirements, the need for formal reporting procedures or a guidance document for the acceptable use of social networks. (There are resources available across E-safety Support to help support these outcomes)

Evidence that formally gathered data is used effectively to assess what impact e-safety practice is having on the school community and procedures and the manner in which this informs the strategy.

- It is suggested that any school should have a formal reflective process which is recorded, for example documented records of any issue that has occurred in school, whether the relevant policies and procedures were effective and whether they needed updating or modifying. Did the issue identify a need for additional staff training in the area concerned etc.

This was the final article in the Interpreting Ofsted series. If you would like to add your comments or suggestions to help other schools, please use the comments section below.