Best Practice

Online safeguarding: Trends, resources and advice

Safeguarding PSHE E-safety Pupil wellbeing
Safeguarding and online safety expert Charlotte Aynsley identifies some of the growing trends to look out for in the months ahead and considers what a whole-school approach to online safeguarding should look like

While every school knows the importance of safeguarding in our digital world, it is also important that they know and understand the most effective strategies to help safeguard their pupils online, both in and out of the classroom.

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) has recently launched Education for a Connected World, a framework which aims to highlight, across all key stages, the skills and knowledge children should have in order to feel safe, and act responsibly, online so that they are able to enjoy the online world.

The framework contains learning outcomes which map to the PSHE and computing curriculums, but it also presents opportunities for teachers to incorporate online safety into a range of other subjects, such as English, and while it doesn’t provide teaching resources, it does give schools a very clear idea of the competencies pupils should have at each stage of their learning.

These guidelines are also designed to help schools to better understand what they should be doing to introduce and tailor online safety strategies across all of the age groups. For instance, it is very important to introduce online safety to children from a young age, in a way that is age-appropriate for them.

For example, for younger children we would talk to them about friendships and being kind to one another in the online world, whereas with older children this discussion would progress to what to do if you’re being bullied online, how to screen-grab content and report content to providers.

It is a really useful guide for schools, and while it isn’t a statutory framework, it can’t be ignored; if the purpose of school is to prepare young people for their future lives, online safeguarding is probably the most important topic for any school to tackle.

In addition to incorporating this framework into the way they teach online safety, schools also need to stay up-to-date with the key online trends and cultural shifts that are presenting continued risks to children online.

Here follows a few of the latest trends to look out for in 2018.

Snapchat

Snapchat continues to remain a challenge for many schools. While a lot of social media is used for bullying behaviours, it can be argued that Snapchat’s concept promotes risky behaviour because whatever content you share will then disappear, meaning users might think the risk has been eliminated.

In response to this concern Snapchat has introduced functionality to enable you to see if someone has saved your picture, but that doesn’t stop someone from saving the imagery in the first place.

Anonymous messaging

Anonymous messaging services, when used in a bullying context, can also present a serious concern, because they facilitate on-going abuse without the victim ever being able to identify who’s doing it. But the tide could be changing here – recently, an app was removed from the iTunes store after a successful petition was instigated and we might see more people taking a stand against sites and apps like this.

Live broadcasting

One of the biggest changes in online safety threats in the last 12 months has been the live broadcasting environment. Unlike a standard social media post, children can’t remove it if they think they’ve made a mistake – a live environment, whether it’s Facebook Live, Snapchat or Instagram, is instantaneous and content can’t be edited or changed – it is out there for all to see.

This trend has also had an impact on sexting – more children are sharing imagery in this way than sharing static imagery. Young children can very quickly send an image or broadcast a video, but may not have the knowledge to stop and consider the impact and implications of whether they should be doing it because in terms of their brain development they are not fully able to understand the true consequences of their actions.

Cyber-bullying

There have been some notable changes in terms of online bullying in recent months. While statistics vary considerably between age groups about increases or decreases in instances of online bullying, there is an increasing trend involving a specific bullying tactic – children being excluded from online conversations. This is an emerging and increasing bullying tactic.

This could mean, for instance, pupils pushing individuals out of Whatsapp groups or removing them from group chats on other platforms. This trend is much more subtle than the overt name-calling and abuse we usually associate with online safety, but while the more usual kind of cyber-bullying is still of course happening, this new bullying trend is becoming more widespread.

Social media companies

In terms of the potential to report abuse or bullying, more needs to be done. Reporting online activity can be notoriously difficult, and this is an area where social networking sites and apps need to take much more responsibility. Pupils themselves actually want social media sites to intervene – I often hear children say that they have reported content but it has taken a long time for it to be taken down, so we need to see much more transparency from these sites about their thresholds and processes for reporting.

The school response

Online safety continues to present challenges to schools. Ofsted has made it clear that schools ought to have a robust system in place to report an incident, not just as part of their online safety strategy but for bullying in general.

We are also seeing a growing number of secondary schools using monitoring tools as a form of protecting students by understanding exactly what they are doing online. This intelligence can then be used to build their education programme, intervene where appropriate or offer more bespoke, directed support towards vulnerable children.

And while technical solutions and robust reporting systems are crucial tools in keeping pupils safe, what we also need to focus on is instilling a cultural shift, and enabling a culture of collaboration and support where pupils have a respect for safeguarding and their role in their own safety.

Another vital and often neglected area is the concept of peer-to-peer mentoring for teenage children and young people. From the age of around 13, children tend to refer much more to their peers than their families. Therefore, we need to recognise that peers have a really important role in supporting and mentoring each other, both online and offline.

A whole-school approach

For schools who are embarking on this journey, or beginning to align their safeguarding strategies with the UKCCIS framework, one of the most effective strategies is to focus on your tailored whole-school approach. On some occasions, schools have devised an online safety policy based on assumptions around what the threats are, rather than seeking this information from their pupils.

No policy is going to be fully effective without actually engaging the pupils and listening to their experiences and concerns about various sites, apps and the worrying behaviours that they see. This could be achieved by running an annual, anonymous survey – the data from such a survey offers schools a strong foundation on which to build a robust strategy and important information to develop their whole-school approach.

I would also suggest that if schools currently have an offline peer-to-peer mentoring solution, they look at bringing that into their online strategy too, because if children are behaving badly online, they need to be challenged in exactly the same way as they would be in an offline context – the bystander principle needs to operate in the online world too.

The next step should be around delivering high-quality education and training across the curriculum, covering all the issues schools need to talk to their pupils about, which might be over and above what’s been outlined in the framework.

Ensuring staff are trained in online safety, ensuring they understand the risks and know how to respond when someone reports an incident is also essential, as is having a designated online safety lead. We are certainly beginning to see more schools accessing training for staff around online safety. Parents also need to be supported through awareness initiatives, as we know they look to schools for information on this topic.

Technologies like filtering and monitoring should support your overall strategy, rather than dictate it, and feed into effective processes for monitoring and reviewing safeguarding for the benefit of the pupils, the school and its stakeholders.

This process is really about mitigating risks – while children cannot be safe 100 per cent of the time, we want to make sure that, as a whole-school community, we have done everything that we possibly can to help minimise these risks.

  • Charlotte Aynsley is an online safety consultant at RM Education and owner of E-safety Training and Consultancy.

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