While every school knows the importance of safeguarding in our digital world, it’s 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), have recently launched 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 Curriculum, but it also presents opportunities for teachers to incorporate online safety into a range of other subjects, e.g. 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’s 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 be 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’s 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.
Snapchat, for example, continues to remain a challenge for many schools. While a lot of social media is used for bullying behaviours, they are not intrinsically bad however you could argue that Snapchat does promote risky behaviour because it perpetuates the concept that whatever content you share, it will then disappear so the risk is considered to be eliminated.
However, many children have wised up to this and Snapchat has introduced functionality to enable you to see if someone has saved your picture, but that doesn’t stop someone filming over their shoulder or saving the imagery.
Anonymous messaging services, when used in a bullying context, can also present a serious concern, because it facilitates ongoing 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 could see more people taking a stand against sites like this.
But one of the biggest changes to 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 or Snapchat or Instagram, is instantaneous and content can’t be edited or changed – it’s out there for all to see!
This trend has also impacted 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.
Sexting is an area which could see some significant changes over the next few years. While there haven’t been any amends to existing legislation, there’s currently a case in Manchester where a pupil’s mother is challenging the fact that her son has been given a criminal record for being involved in a non-aggravated sexting incident. This could change the way police record and respond to the crime.
If her challenge is successful, this could set a new precedent in terms of case law. It will be interesting to see how this evolves, because under current law, while sexting is clearly a very serious issue, it can currently have more serious ramifications in terms of criminality than the act of a child having underage sex.
There have also been some notable changes in terms of online bullying in recent months. While statistics vary considerably between age groups with increases or decreases in instances of online bullying, there are more instances of children being excluded from online conversations and this being used as a 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 we usually associate with online safety, but while the former is still happening, the latter is becoming more widespread.
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