Please click here to read a parent and carer guide to online safety resources
Online Safety is considered to be very important at Monkspath School. We believe our role is twofold:
Teaching of online safety is built into the school curriculum from Nursery through to Year 6. All year groups work on age appropriate activities. These lessons take place half termly throughout the year.
By the start of Year 1 all children will have personal ‘logons’ and passwords which they are taught to keep secret. This is the beginning of them learning to keep their digital information safe.
We hold a whole school Online Safety week every year to coincide with Safer Internet Day www.saferinternetcentre.co.uk. During this week the whole school focuses on online safety in a variety of cross curricular ways including Literacy, Numeracy PHSE, Art and Music. We send home resources and information for parents and carers to support them.
Online Safety information is visible around school as a reminder to our whole community, this includes the ‘SMART’ rules from CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre www.thinkuknow.co.uk/.
Within school we have children who are our Digital Leaders. They work alongside the adult members of the school online safety team to develop policy, seek opinions from and inform their peers and act as role models. All Year groups from Years 1 – 6 have their own Digital Leaders.
All children are encouraged to report anything that makes them feel uncomfortable in their digital life, whether inside or outside school. We have a variety of ways that children, parents or carers can report; including the ‘Whisper’ button on our website which enables anyone to make anonymous reports, worry boxes, or directly speaking to a member of staff. All members of our school community can be assured that any reports are taken seriously and reported to the Senior Leadership Team using our reporting system.
All staff are trained to ensure a rigorous approach to this. Parent and carer workshops are held to inform and support. These workshops can be viewed on our YouTube channel (Monkspath School). We recommend the South West Grid for Learning E-safety Family Tool Kit for parents of younger children and Vodafone Digital Parenting website and magazine to all parents as a way of keeping up to date with the challenges faced by children in the ever changing digital landscape; http://www.vodafone.com/content/parents/digital-parenting.html.
Acceptable user agreements are in place for staff, pupils and parents to ensure a constantly safe approach to the use of technology at our school. We monitor our reputation online using an online and social media alerting tool.
