Online Safety
The NEN Safeguarding Group is leading on much of the national online safety advice to schools. Some of our members are part of UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) and regional Prevent teams. SWGfL is a partner in the UK Safer Internet Centre which provides a national awareness centre and helplines for professionals.
Additionally, NEN represents the school community at the Digital Policy Alliance Internet Safety Group as well as having regular contact with DfE, the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre.
Through our members and their specialist online safety teams, they are providing expert advice, training and support to schools in their region and nationally. The list below highlights some of key services or sites that might be of interest. Links are shown in red.
- The UK Safer Internet Centre is co-ordinated by a partnership of three leading organisations: SWGfL, Childnet International and the IWF. It’s co-funded by the European Commission and runs Safer Internet Day every year in February. It provides the following key services:
- Professionals Online Safety Helpline supporting those working with children
- Hotline for reporting and removing sexual images of children online
- Report Harmful Content is designed to assist anyone in reporting harmful content online
- Revenge Porn Helpline
Also, the UK Safer Internet Centre offers Online Safety Live which is a programme of free e-safety events designed exclusively for professionals working with children and young people. To find out more information on how you can attend or host one of these events go to their website here or visit our events section.
SWGfL has developed two comprehensive tools for educators to use to support their schools and children. They are both free to use and are ideal in helping support schools in their obligations under ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’. The tools are:
360degree safe, a free online safety self-review tool for schools. Every year, the data collected through the tool is analysed to see the common trends. Here is a snapshot from 2023
Project Evolve, is a free toolkit that covers all aspects of the UKCIS “Education in a connected world” Framework, across all age phases from nursery to 18 years.
London Grid for Learning provides a wide variety of resources covering all aspects of safeguarding. Through their resource centre, you can search through reports, policies and research as well as find information on parental engagement, counter-extremism, serious youth violence, fake news and body image. Here are some of their key resources and focused sites:
ParentSafe, provides a one-stop-shop for parents around the area of Online Safety
Digisafe, provides a one-stop-shop for school online safety resources and events
Going too far? The law and online extremism
Through Kent County Council (part of SEGfL), Kelsi is the Kent Online Safety guidance for education settings. They collate Kent resources, as well as national guidance to enable leaders, managers, proprietors and Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSL) within education settings to develop and implement a whole-setting approach towards online safety and fulfil their statutory safeguarding obligations.
Lancashire Safeguarding Boards work with partners across the North West region on a variety of safeguarding areas, providing online safety advice, guidance and resources to schools, parents and other organisations on a wide variety of online topics, including the highly popular preventforschools.org website.