Online Safety at St Mary & St Pancras
At St Mary & St Pancras CE Primary school we take online safety extremely seriously. We believe that it is the right of all children to feel safe and secure when using different types of digital technology and our aim for our children is to become good digital citizens.
By embedding online safety across our curriculum, we aim to empower our young children to use the internet and other technologies safely and responsibly. We ensure that all children know what to do if they are uncomfortable with anything they see, hear or experience online and teach them the correct way to report it. All of our staff are CEOP trained (November 1st 2021) and understand their role in supporting children understand how to navigate the online world as safely as possible.
We have a simple procedure to deal with such incidents at school which we hope is also used at home:
If something doesn’t feel right… it probably isn’t.
Tell an adult you trust straight away. At STMP every child chooses two adults in school as their ‘safe’ adults and we encourage children to express their worries through talking or through the use of class worry-boxes which are checked regularly and acted upon.
Our online safety policy holds detailed information about how we ensure our children remain safe in their use of digital technology. You can download it below.
Filtering and Monitoring
We want our children to access digital content as part of their learning. However, we know that the some content in the online world is not appropriate nor safe for children.
To keep them safe, we employ a filtering and monitoring system.
As a school we are linked to the London Grid for Learning or LGfL. We use the School Protect-WebScreen as our filtering system, which meets the national defined ‘appropriate filtering standards’. The filtering system blocks illegal and inappropriate content.
Though no system can be 100% effective, together with our culture of active supervision by staff when children are on line, and online safety lessons, we are doing all that we reasonably can to limit the children’s exposure to risks.
Regular monitoring allows us to review user activity in the school and scrutinise the websites that have been requested by users- this is an additional layer of protection and means that any concerning behaviour by any user can be identified. All staff are aware of their reporting responsibilities , in line with our safeguarding culture of vigilance under KCSIE 2023.
We want our children to confidently develop into digital citizens for the future so it is important that we don’t ‘over block’ the internet-it does have value-but we need to control access and monitor activity.
The schools Filtering and Monitoring leads are Jules Belton HT and James Poole, Chair of Governors, who are also trained in cybersecurity.
Advice for parents and carers.
Information leaflet from Camden Safeguarding Children Board
Step-by-step instructions to setting parental controls on all of your devices.
Find out all you need to know about keeping your child safe online by clicking here.
Top tips for parents – GRAND THEFT AUTO
It is vital that parents carers work together with us to ensure that our children stay safe in their use of technology.
When we talk about online safety, we are not just talking about the internet. We are talking about the use of computers, games consoles (such as an X-Box), mobile phones, televisions, tablets (such as the iPad) and many apps that children can now access and communicate with. The online world is very exciting to children but a minefield of potentially harmful scenarios. We ask that parents understand their role in supervising their child’s online activity. Children who bring phones to school have to hand them in at the office until the end of the day. Reports of issues online between children outside of school are very rare but when they do happen, take valuable learning time to resolve. Our advice to parents remains the same; think about what access to the online world you child has and when, talk to them about your expectations of how they use technology and use parental controls and seek advice if you need to. We will always support children and parents if a difficult situation occurs but most are preventable.
There are several elements to online safety that we teach at St Mary & St Pancras:
- How to use the internet and devices safely, and what to do if something goes wrong or we see something we shouldn’t.
- How to keep ourselves safe – keeping our details private and keeping our data secure.
- How to behave when using technology – being courteous and responsible, and what to do if others treat us in a way which is not kind. This is directly linked with our positive learning behaviour, relationships education and anti-bullying policies.
- Encouraging a healthy use of technology – not over-using mobiles, consoles or computers.
