Schools and colleges have a statutory responsibility to keep children safe online as well as offline. The Department for Education’s statutory guidance ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ obliges schools in England to “ensure appropriate filters and appropriate monitoring systems are in place and regularly review their effectiveness” and they “should be doing all that they reasonably can to limit children’s exposure to the risks from the school’s IT system”. However, schools will need to “be careful that over blocking” does not lead to unreasonable restrictions as to what children can be taught with regards to online teaching and safeguarding.

Filtering and monitoring systems are used at Ravenscote Junior School to keep pupils safe when they are using accessing content online.

Filtering systems: block access to harmful sites and content.

Monitoring systems: identify when a user accesses or searches for certain types of harmful content on school devices (it doesn’t stop someone accessing it). We are then alerted to any concerning content so we can intervene and respond as appropriate.

No filtering and monitoring system is 100% effective, so they are used alongside our existing safeguarding systems and procedures.

For further information, please visit the link below

Government Guidance – Filtering and Monitoring in Schools