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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:

- 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.

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:

- 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.

- 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)

- 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.

New research from Voxburner shows that when it comes to new and future technologies, 87% of 16-24s are concerned about the security of the data that they share.

There is a popular belief that young people are frivolous with their data and don’t have any concerns about privacy, but 67% of 16-24s say that security is their number one priority when buying an Internet-connected product. Reliability (45%), cost (43%) and ease of use (22%) were other considerations noted.

Claire, aged 18 from Medway, says, “I certainly have concerns about data privacy and in some cases I will avoid whatever I am doing if I am not willing to share my information with the company. However, in some circumstances I do make the trade off in the hope that the company will be responsible and I will get a decent deal for my sacrifice.”

Businesses and the media are becoming more excited by the Internet of Things, but are young consumers? When asked about their understanding of the term ‘Internet of Things’, 53% of respondents have never heard of it, whilst 19% say they have heard of it but don’t know what it means and 17% have heard of it and know a little. Only 6% say they fully understand it.

When given a full explanation on what The Internet of Things is, 80% of young consumers say the concept sounds interesting to them, 75% feel excited although 16% feel scared and 9% say they feel threatened.

Where the Internet of Things could have the best impact on the lives of 16-24s, 60% of respondents would like to use it to help them research products whilst shopping and save money, 55% say it would have an impact in the home, for controlling things on the move, whilst personal improvement like tracking fitness or better productivity (55%) and for social connectivity to stay better connected and closer to friends and family (46%) are other reasons cited.

Luke Mitchell, Head of Insights at Voxburner says, “The three biggest ways the Internet of Things can help young people are adamantly argued by our respondents: time-saving, added life value and money-saving. These are themes that resonate across all areas of their lives - they want value, convenience and fun. Despite having a higher than average stake in technology and a strong interest in what the Internet of Things can bring, there are concerns too. We’re seeing young people becoming more worried about their data and control of personal information. Respondents can see that the Internet of Things potentially means more of their life is exposed digitally.”

Over a third of 16-24s say the risks associated with new technology such as the Internet of Things do not outweigh the benefits.

The full research ‘Are young people wild about the Internet of Things’ can be downloaded for free on the Voxburner website.

A few weeks ago an article appeared within my Facebook timeline from an online newspaper I follow. It reported on a young man in Colorado, USA , who was wanted on a drugs charge. He had been chased by the police at high speed and had managed to crash into dozens of other vehicles. He also evaded the police by car-jacking, no less than three other vehicles, one of which was a mother, who was stopped and dragged out of her car whilst the man sped away with her terrified four year old son in the back seat (he was later retrieved frightened and distraught but unharmed when the felon abandoned that car for another).

As I looked down the many, many comments attached to the posting, I was shocked to read postings such as:

“Ha, its just like GTA…” or,

“He’s been playing too much Grand Theft Auto lol!”

What struck me was the casual nature in which people acknowledged an incident that must have been unbelievably traumatic for the mother of the four year-old and the other victims for that matter, even to the point of thinking that it was something to have a bit of a giggle about.

As I read further comments of a similar vein, I started to reflect on whether our now daily engagement with technology is impacting our capacity to differentiate between the real and virtual worlds and whether it is encouraging a worrying trend, with some people, towards insensitive voyeurism; an acceptance that everything on the web is provided for entertainment and an inability to sympathise with a victim.

I then began to consider what impact this phenomena maybe having on young people and this made me think about some experiences I have had in my role as a supply teacher in both primary and secondary schools. Recently, I have noticed how the words ‘rape’ and ‘porn’ appear to have crept into the everyday conversations of young people, even to the point of modifying them with a view to include them in youth culture, as in the word ‘frape’.

Surely, the ‘normalisation’ of these words into our youth vocabulary is not healthy and is contrary to the nurturing environments that adults should be ensuring exist within school and at home. So, how does this happen?

This blurring of the boundaries between reality and cyberspace can manifest itself in much more sinister and darker ways too. A year or so back, I was teaching a Y11 resistant materials class who had a double lesson that spanned over dinner time. A couple of the boys returned to school after spending their dinner at a house of one of the group. As they entered the workshop they were laughing and I overheard one them saying “… it was just like on ‘Fallout’ ”. Thinking that they had been playing video games I asked them about it; however, I was shocked to discover that what they had been watching was a real beheading that had been posted on the internet by a terrorist group. What was equally distressing was how they had viewed this horrific scene, coldly disconnecting the fact that this was a real person from the voyeuristic and trivial ‘entertainment’ the video provided for them. They even likened the event to computer games that they had played to the point of interpreting and reconciling the video as just another scene from a computer game.

As a consequence of the ubiquitous nature of the worldwide web and the type of material that can be accessed, do you think that the real worlds of young people are being dangerously impacted by their cyber worlds? Do you believe that the way in which content is presented such that the difference between the real and the fictional is distinctly vague and blurred, encourages young people to becoming desensitised and numb to real events and situations that, prior to the technological age, would have been genuinely seen as horrific, upsetting or gruesome?

Or do you believe that the impact of the web is no different to the influence on youth culture of radio and television in the post-war 20th century and it is inevitable that media will affect the language and behaviour of young people?

To let us know your opinion is on this important topic, please use the comments section below. There are also a number of related lesson plans and assembly plans available from E-safety Support