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Great Bowden Academy

Great Bowden Academy

E-Safety ​​​​​​​

We take e-safety very seriously at Great Bowden Academy. One of our biggest challenges today is ensuring our children are safe online. In our ever-changing world, children are exposed to a variety of different media and information. Increasing provision of the Internet both in and out of school brings with it the need to ensure our children are safe. At school we use the Project Evolve scheme of work to help make sure that our e-safety curriculum is up-to-date, well-resourced and comprehensive. The children have regular lessons on e-safety as part of their computing and PSHE curriculum.  We regularly talk to, and remind, the children about ways they should be vigilant when they use computers and phones.

Please find our Learn-At E-Safety policy here, which includes useful links to e-safety resources for parents, as well as details on acceptable use of the internet in school.

Keeping our Children Safe Online – Support for Parents 

As part of our work on helping to keep our community safe online, here are some tips and links for families and parents, which should hopefully help you to feel more confident in ensuring your child is keeping safe online at home.  

1. Talking to your Child about Internet Safety

Technology can move at an extraordinarily fast pace. So it can be difficult to know how to start talking to your child about what they are doing online, who they might be speaking to or discussing the potential risks and issues. 

The NSPCC website is a great place to start for advice and links about how to approach this topic with your child.

Visit: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/talking-child-online-safety/ 

2. The ABC Online Safety Checklist 

Internet Matters (www.internetmatters.org ) is a fantastic website that is committed to helping to keep children safe in a digital world.  

It has created a simple guide for parents to help them get started with children’s safety online by creating the ABC Safety Checklist. 

Visit: www.internetmatters.org/abc-online-safety-checklist/

3. A Parent’s Guide to Parental Controls

The online world gives us access to a huge amount of information and services, but the scale of information available also means that there is content that is inappropriate for children. What is or isn’t appropriate is up to individual parents and carers to decide, but setting up parental controls is a way to help control what your child has exposure to.

Parental controls allow you to block and filter upsetting or inappropriate content. They work across your WiFi, phone network, individual apps and devices.

Parental controls can help you to:

  • plan what time of day your child can go online and how long for
  • create content filters to block apps that may have inappropriate content
  • manage the content different family members can see.

The NSPCC has some great advice on how to set up parental controls here: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/parental-controls/ 

4. A Parent’s Guide to Privacy Settings

The internet can be a great way for people to connect with friends, family and new people. An increasing amount of children and young people are using social media, gaming and live-streaming apps to chat and share content with others. But connecting and sharing with people online can come with risks too.

Once shared, personal information like their name, address, photos, or bank details online, could be used by others. For example, it could lead to the child being bullied, groomed or blackmailed. It might also be used by cyber criminals.

Privacy settings can help you and your child to manage how much and what kind of information is shared, whilst enjoying their favourite sites, games and apps. But what is this and how do we set it up?

CEOP have a useful article that explains privacy settings and how they can help your child to manage the content they share and who they connect with.
Visit  www.ceopeducation.co.uk/parents/articles/a-parents-guide-to-privacy-settings/  

5. A Parent’s Guide to Setting up Gaming Consoles

Gaming consoles – such as the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X – are always popular with children and young people. However, with most devices, it's not just about gaming to consider, they are multi-faceted gaming, social, multimedia retail stations. What does that mean? It’s access to a whole new online world and online friendships that you may want to set boundaries around.

That’s why it’s really important to set up their new console before the fun commences – as well as being aware of all the functionalities today’s games consoles offer.

Parent Zone have a handy guide to gaming consoles and gives advice on what to consider when buying new tech, as well as all the information you need about setting up the top three consoles – such as parental controls and restrictions.

Visit Parent Zone here  https://parentzone.org.uk/article/setting-up-gaming-consoles

6. E-Safety round up

We hope you have found our e-safety tips and resources helpful over the past few months. We know what a challenging and fast-paced world it can be. However, there are some fantastic organisations out there to help navigate you in keeping your child safe online. www.nationalcollege.com for example contains lots of parent guides such as ‘What Parents & Educators Need to Know about Fortnite’, ‘Top Tips for Using & Reviewing Parental Controls’ and ‘Top Tips for Creating Family Rules for Using Devices’ along with other non-online related advice.

Visit them here: https://nationalcollege.com

As we come to the end of our e-safety advice, we thought it might be useful to give you a list of the resources we have discussed here…

 

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