Effective Monitoring and Filtering Solutions
When reading the Keeping Children Safe in Education document, it can be tricky to fully understand what is required of schools in regards to filtering and monitoring.
An effective approach to online safety empowers a school or college to protect and educate the whole school or college community in their use of technology and establishes mechanisms to identify, intervene in, and escalate any incident where appropriate
Keeping children safe in education- September 2020
Key Questions
Some of the key questions school leaders should ask are:
- Do you get real time and summary reports of the children’s internet usage, including search history, blocked content, and web traffic to build a picture of how the pupils behave online?
- Do these reports clearly identify time, location, device and user information?
- Are your devices provided by the school for home use fully filtered, even when not in school?
- Is the filtering age appropriate, including staff accounts?
- Does the school include filtering and monitoring reports at governor safeguarding meetings?
- Are filtering and monitoring referenced in all anti-bullying policies and online safety policies?
Ideally, the answers to all of the above would be YES.
Solution
PrimaryTech aim to help schools ensure their filtering and monitoring is as robust as required by KCSIEE, and that staff have appropriate training and guidance. Our team include trained CEOP ambassadors, assessors for the Online Safety Mark and Data Protection Officers, so are best placed to provide advice in this area.
To answer many of those questions effectively, schools need an effective filtering provider. A leader in this market global is Securly, who monitor over 5 billion activities and serve over 15,000 schools.
Features
Their suite of tools include cloud based monitoring (no hardware on site) that filters all device types and included AI to flag activity linked to self harm and bullying.
Securly also produce products like Auditor, which can scan documents and emails for cyberbullying, Tipline to report suspicison activity, 24, a service to review activity 24/7 and Classroom, which gives teachers the ability to monitor student online activity in real time, lock screens, push websites to devices and more!
Outcome
Schools that utilise Securly get to see real time dashboards like the above, regardless of where their children are learning. They are safe in the knowledge that their children’s online wellbeing is taken care of.
“Securly has changed our reporting and monitoring in and out of school. The alerts we receive are instant, and the dashboard is easy to navigate. Scheduled reports allow us to inform governors, but most of all, we know the children are able to use our devices safely”
– Meg Sellar – IT Coordinator – Leconfield Primary School
Published: November 19
Tags: filtering