Online Safety Policy

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Aims

The Lady Margaret and Durdan’s Park Schools’ Federation aims to:

  • Have robust processes in place to ensure the online safety of pupils, staff, volunteers and governors
  • Identify and support groups of pupils that are potentially at greater risk of harm online than others
  •  Deliver an effective approach to online safety, which empowers us to protect and educate the whole school community in its use of technology, including mobile and smart technology (which we refer to as ‘mobile phones’)
  •  Establish clear mechanisms to identify, intervene and escalate an incident, where appropriate

The 4 key categories of risk

Our approach to online safety is based on addressing the following categories of risk:

  • Content – being exposed to illegal, inappropriate or harmful content, such as pornography, fake news, racism, misogyny, self-harm, suicide, antisemitism, radicalisation and extremism
  • Contact – being subjected to harmful online interaction with other users, such as peer-to-peer pressure, commercial advertising and adults posing as children or young adults with the intention to groom or exploit them for sexual, criminal, financial or other purposes
  • Conduct – personal online behaviour that increases the likelihood of, or causes, harm, such as making, sending and receiving explicit images (e.g. consensual and non-consensual sharing of nudes and semi-nudes and/or pornography), sharing other explicit images and online bullying; and
  • Commerce – risks such as online gambling, inappropriate advertising, phishing and/or financial scams

Legislation and guidance

This policy is based on the Department for Education’s (DfE’s) statutory safeguarding guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, and its advice for schools on:

Teaching online safety in schools

Preventing and tackling bullying and cyber-bullying: advice for headteachers and school staff  Health and Relationship

Searching, screening and confiscation

It also refers to the DfE’s guidance on protecting children from radicalisation.

It reflects existing legislation, including but not limited to the Education Act 1996 (as amended), the Education and Inspections Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2010. In addition, it reflects the Education Act 2011, which has given teachers stronger powers to tackle cyber-bullying by, if necessary, searching for and deleting inappropriate images or files on pupils’ electronic devices where they believe there is a ‘good reason’ to do so.

The policy also takes into account the National Curriculum computing programmes of study and we use Project Evolve to support the teaching of online safety.

Full Policy

PDF FILE

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Approved by:

Published:
September 2024

Last reviewed on:
September 2024

Next review due by:
September 2025

Part of Ealing Bridges Federation

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