E-Safety
Our children's safety online is paramount. We teach E Safety through our curriculum subjects of Computing and RHE as well as support National Internet Safety Days throughout the year.
We share regular updates with parents and staff to ensure our community is aware of any negative changes online, that may affect our children.
Updates
March 2023
This free online safety guide looks at cultivating safe and healthy habits in our online lives. We’ve compiled a list of useful suggestions which could help you and your family strike the right balance and build digital resilience.
Safe and Healthy Habits Online
This free online safety guide looks at iPads, the world’s most popular tablet computers. It highlights possible hazards including the risk of age-inappropriate content, physical damage to the device and potential screen addiction.
Need to Know Info about Ipads
February 2023
This free online safety guide looks at the rise of artificial intelligence solutions. It highlights potential risks such as inaccurate information, reinforcing stereotypes and what impact the technology might have on children’s creativity and problem-solving skills.
AI Solutions
This free online safety guide looks at Spotify – the world’s favourite music streaming platform. It highlights potential risks including age-inappropriate lyrics, an audio chat function and recent reports of predatory activity.
What you need to know about Spotify
The potential negative effects of gaming on young people’s mental health (when the compulsion to play begins to interfere with regular activities like homework, exercise or socialising) are well documented. In recent years however, there’s been a groundswell of research making a contrasting point – that safe, healthy amounts of gaming can actually help to improve mental wellbeing. One of the most prominent studies was carried out by Oxford University in 2021, which found that moderate amounts of time playing family-friendly games led to respondents reporting an improved sense of mental wellbeing. Our guide has ten tips for trusted adults on how safe, healthy gaming can offer more than just an enjoyable leisure activity for children.
Gaming as a family
This free online safety guide looks at ways that trusted adults can encourage open conversations with children and young people about their digital lives. It outlines useful tips such as being as honest as possible, discussing how misleading the online world can be and creating a ‘family agreement’.
How to have open discussions about our digital lives
January 2023
This week's free online safety guide focuses on Cyber Resilience. It highlights a number of risks such as how to use a password manager, how to back up your data and how to check for breaches.
Tips for building cyber resilience
Understanding the Playground - Fortnite
Since its release 2017, the battle-royale simulator – Fortnite, has become ubiquitous in classrooms and playgrounds throughout the world. The game, which features cartoonish renderings of characters, bright colours and non-visceral consequence free violence, has had a mass appeal to children. Each Christmas another draft of young pupils are induced into its overcrowded multi-player lobbies, to the point that there is not a school pupil in the country who hasn’t owned it, begged their parents for it or played it round a friend’s house. As a result more children than ever are exposed to multi-player chatting with strangers, and financial exploitation via the game’s spend-to-gain-advantage operating style. Allowing children to use real world money to gain perks and costumes. From criminal blackmailing, to the coercion of nude exchanges by online ‘friends’ posing as children, the danger this game presents from a safeguarding perspective is clear. As an added complication, the verbiage surrounding the game used by pupils is near-incomprehensible, frustrating adepts to secure their safety. Fortunately to allow for greater comprehension of reports to staff involving the game, Internetmatters.org has published a guide to understanding the game and its terms. You can find the link below:
A Guide to Online Safety and Gaming
As a new generation of young people arrive onto using multiplayer games and the internet in general this new year, it is more important than ever to make your pupils aware of how to stay safe online. The SWGfL has published a pamphlet on how to best keep safe whilst using online software and games. With advice on reporting and blocking, online socialization and the considerations on online gaming, the pamphlet can be a useful resource for any teaching staff, giving lessons on the topic. You can find a link to that resource below:
https://swgfl.org.uk/assets/