St Catherine's Catholic School
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Online Safety
Online safety is a big part of our safeguarding agenda at St Catherine's and also forms part of our ICT provision in lessons at KS3 and across our PSHE programme.
Monitoring and Filtering
In line with Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2023 and St Catherine's Online Safety Policy and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), monitoring and filtering systems are used to keep our students safe and secure when using the school’s IT network and systems.
At St Catherine's, appropriate and compliant web-based filtering is provided by London Grid for Learning, our internet services provider and Impero for Education software provides our monitoring solution, which detects inappropriate or potentially inappropriate content against a library of words and categories such as bullying, sexual exploitation, self-harm, racism, indicators of emotional distress, suicide, radicalisation and extremism etc.
What is Monitoring and Filtering?
Monitoring systems: identify when a user accesses or searches for certain types of harmful content on school and college devices (it doesn’t stop someone accessing it). The school is then alerted to any concerning content so that we can intervene and respond.
Impero for Education screen ‘captures’ activity on the school’s network and IT resources when triggered and shows what was displayed at the time, by whom and when the incident took place. These captures are then reviewed by key members of staff with responsibility for monitoring and safeguarding.
Filtering systems: block access to harmful sites and content.
LGfL Webscreen is a powerful yet flexible, safe web filter designed specifically for schools. Based on the industry-standard Netsweeper engine, which is constantly scanning the internet to categorise and identify harm in new and old websites.
No monitoring and filtering system is 100% effective, so it is used alongside the school's existing safeguarding policies and procedures, including training on e-safety and cyber security for students, staff and governors.
Students are reminded that safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility and they should report anything in school, which causes them concern, to a member of staff, including material available on the school’s computers and network (or information being accessed by others).
In using the school’s network and IT resources, students agree to comply with St Catherine's IT Security and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), a copy of which is published in the student's planners and should be signed by all students and parents.
Computers, the internet, software and other IT resources are provided to help and reinforce student learning and any misuse of these resources or breach of this policy, may result in behaviour sanctions.
Online Safety in the home and personal mobile devices
Parental roles for online safety:
Below are some useful links provided by the Child Exploitation and National Online Protection Centre as well as other independent agencies to help parents, cares and students understand the threats that children may be exposed to online, as well as ways of dealing with and minimising the risks.
St Catherine's encourages our parents and carers to support their children by spending some time looking through the various links below and discussing internet safety with them. There are also tips and guides for implementing parental controls on your home broadband connections and mobile device 4G connections, that we highly recommend for keeping students safe outside of our school network environment.
Advice for parents to help support and protect your children online:
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/parental-controls/
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/online-games/
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/social-media/
https://www.childnet.com/help-and-advice/parents-and-carers
https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/
https://www.childline.org.uk/info-advice/bullying-abuse-safety/online-mobile-safety/
https://www.parentsprotect.co.uk/
National Online Safety Top Tips:
Social Media and keeping your children safe:
Parental Control for iPhones 1.
Parental Control for iPhones 2.
Social Media and Mental Health
Capture - Who's Looking After The Children?
A Financial Times drama starring Jodie Whittaker (Dr Who), Paul Ready (Motherland), Shaniqua Okwok (It's a Sin), looks at online harm, regulation and responsibility.
The search for their missing son leads a mother and father to a tech company, and a digital gatekeeper who seems to have all the answers.
( Contains Adult Language )
