esafety  and parent guides

ESAFETY AT SCHOOL

We keep children eSafe at school both by using electronic protections and by teaching them how to stay safe online.

FILTERING AND MONITORING SYSTEMS

Internet access at school is filtered using blocklists provided by our Internet firewall provider (Sonicwall). These lists are based on those recommended by the UK Safer Internet Centre for Child Sexual Abuse Content, Terrorism Content, Adult Content and also Offensive Language. We regularly check that our systems are using these lists and we also review websites frequently visited from devices in school. Any inappropriate sites are added to an additional blocklist.

School devices, whether used on site or outside of school are monitored for inappropriate use using Smoothwall Monitor. This system monitors keyboard input and other activity and alerts safeguarding staff in school who then investigate these alerts.

STUDENT ONLINE ACTIVITY

Students work online within the protections of the filtering and monitoring systems above. They do have email accounts provided by Microsoft in order to access Teams and various online learning resources. The email accounts themselves are isolated from both sending and receiving outside of Russell Education Trust schools. Students may therefore only interact with other students and staff from the Trust through Microsoft Services and these interactions are monitored and can be logged.

During lessons and for homework, students may need to visit websites in order to undertake some learning activities. The websites planned for use are detailed on the curriculum pages of each subject. Occasionally teachers may ask students to visit other websites.

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT

To supplement information in our newsletters and our parents' events we've collected together some guides for parents to a number of "current" apps and websites that students may be using.

We would also recommend using the 'Parent and Carer toolkit' available to download from Childnet here. The toolkit includes a lot of useful resources including a template for a 'family agreement'.

Instagram
Kik
SnapChat
Whatsapp
YouTube
Live Streaming