Blog – Latest stories tagged 'training'

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.

As educators, one of our key roles is to engage parents in their child’s education. In addition to conventional parents’ evenings, reports and newsletters why not draw on what we do best – teaching – and get parents back into the classroom as students?

A recent workshop at a small rural first school in Staffordshire is a prime example of how powerful this method of engagement can be. St Leonard’s First School headteacher Julie Lane was keen to promote the use of smart technology to enhance learning, and approached us with the idea of hosting a workshop to help parents to ensure their children make the most of their iPads and tablets at home while staying safe online.

The result was an evening course that covered how to manage tablets and set up different restrictions to make them more secure for children to use, as well as exploring various free apps to encourage youngsters in educational use of their tablets and iPads.

In addition to providing parents with peace of mind that they can ensure their children stay safe online we wanted to make the session fun and interactive. We explored how to make puppet shows on the iPads and each group of parents produced their own little show about a Princess called Prudence and her handsome knight, Kevin! I wanted to show parents how easily their children can create exciting multimedia projects and use the iPad for learning as well as for games. We also explored augmented reality using children's own drawings and brought their artwork alive with video explanations from the children themselves.

The feedback from the session has been great – the school reports parents commenting on how useful they found the experience, and has gone on to set up a regular ICT evening club that is attended not only by parents but members of the wider community, as well as including ICT tips and app reviews in its newsletter.

Why seek to constantly reinvent the wheel when often a back to basics approach, focusing on the skills we have as teachers, can have the biggest impact?

For more ideas on how to engage parents in e-safety matters, take a look at the E-safety Support Parent Pack or if you are interested in running a parents’ workshop on e-safety, iPad skills or a host of other topics at your school? Contact Fantastict on 0800 030 5241. Don't forget, all E-safety Support Members qualify for a free needs analysis and Premium and Premium Plus members can also claim discount of Fantastict courses.

This is the second in a series of blog posts focusing on Ofsted’s e-safety framework, which was first briefed to it’s inspectors in September 2012 and has had a number of amendments since then, the latest of which was published in January 2014.

In the last post, we concentrated on the large first section of the framework document, entitled ‘Whole School Consistent Approach’. In this article, we will look at the sections focusing on ‘Robust and Integrated Reporting Routines’ and ‘Staff’.

Robust and Integrated Reporting Routines

This section of the Ofsted e-safety framework focuses on schools’ online reporting procedures, emphasising that the whole school community should have a full and clear understanding about the processes available to them for the reporting of e-safety issues.

This can be demonstrated by:

Information on indicators that Ofsted will be looking out for that will identify good or outstanding practice can be found here.

Staff

In this area of the framework Ofsted’s focus is targeted at the training teaching and non-teaching staff is receiving with regard to e-safety and whether this is regular and up-to-date. Also, whether at least one member of staff, within the school, has received accredited training, for example CEOP or EPICT.

This can be demonstrated by:

These are just some suggestions on how you may develop your e-safety provision. If you would like to share your thoughts on implementing e-safety policy and practice in your school, we would love to hear from you. Please use the comments form below.

Further ideas on how to demonstrate key features of good and outstanding practice will be brought to you in future articles.