Safeguarding & Online Safety
Technology is the basis of all our learning and plays a key role in preparing our children for life beyond school. We work together with families to ensure all pupils are safe online in addition to the real world.
The National College Portal
As pupils' understanding and experience of online material grows, it’s important that our understanding grows alongside theirs so that we all have the knowledge necessary to ensure their experience is positive, safe, and empowering.
We are delighted to offer The National College courses for all our families free of charge, as part of our work with this organisation. The courses are up-to-date and relevant for all our young people and their families.
To create your account, visit The National College and submit your details. When you’re set up, you’ll be able to set ‘Parent/Carer’ as your user type.
How You Can Keep Your Child Safe Online
It is very important to ensure that we are safeguarding our children to ensure that we are providing them with the best possible opportunities, safely. Here are some tips:
- Choose quality technology to support children’s learning and enjoyment, amongst a mix of other offline activities (like paper books, Lego, drawing and sport)
- Get Involved with your child’s online activity
- Create a family agreement to establish boundaries and good etiquette for the whole family, including adults – parents are important role models!
- Consider using filtering software to block unwanted content
- Encourage your children to ‘think before you post.’ Online actions can impact the lives of others. Content posted privately online can be publicly shared by others, and may remain online forever
- Understand the law. Some online behaviour may break the law, for example when downloading or sharing content with others
- Familiarise yourself with the age ratings for games and apps which can help to indicate the level and suitability of the content. T&Cs for accounts on many social media platforms are age 13+
- Keep all equipment that connects to the internet in a family space
- Set up a family email address that your children can use when signing up to new games or websites online
- Encourage your children to use nicknames (where possible) instead of their full, true name online, to protect their personal information
- Create strong passwords for every account; create a new password for every account
- Set up a PIN or password on devices to help protect personal information
- If anyone in your family is being bullied online, save all available evidence and know where to report the incident (for example to the school, service provider, or the police if the law has been broken). Do not reply to or engage with bullies
- Give your child strategies to deal with any online content that they are not comfortable with – such as turning off the screen, telling an adult they trust, or using online reporting facilities, such as Child Exploitation and Online Protection website, which can be accessed immediately by the children by clicking on the purple scared monster on our homepage.