Five Questions About E-safety in Your School

Ofsted ReportSince the inclusion of e-safety in the section 5 inspection briefing, schools now risk missing Ofsted outstanding ratings due to poor e-safety strategy.

With indicators of inadequate e-safety provision including a lack of staff training, stating that “staff training is consistently the weakest area of a schools online safety provision”, along with no planned curriculum content amongst others, it is clear that Ofsted are looking for schools to see e-safety as a whole school issue.

To find out how your school would fair against the Ofsted standards considered outstanding or inadequate, start by asking yourself these 5 questions.

How would your school respond?

Following an inspection audit, St Wilfrid's School's Digital Leaders teacher (and E-safety Support Premium Plus member) commented:

The e-safety part of the review left the inspector with no matters for concern or improvement; she said that ‘we didn’t seem to realise how good we actually were as a school’. She loved our parental engagement ideas and other things that I have in the pipeline. In the final report she wrote against the ‘E-safety’ section that we ‘exceeded Ofsted e-Safety requirements by far’ and the last word was ‘Congratulations’. We’ve obviously done some good work, but thanks and congratulations should go in part to your good selves also.

We would love to hear how your school would respond to the Ofsted 5 question - Complete our anonymous 5 e-safety questions survey to let us know.

Written by Safeguarding Essentials on June 12, 2014 11:45

Get parents back into the classroom

Parent WorkshopAs educators, one of our key roles is to engage parents in their child’s education. In addition to conventional parents’ evenings, reports and newsletters why not draw on what we do best – teaching – and get parents back into the classroom as students?

A recent workshop at a small rural first school in Staffordshire is a prime example of how powerful this method of engagement can be. St Leonard’s First School headteacher Julie Lane was keen to promote the use of smart technology to enhance learning, and approached us with the idea of hosting a workshop to help parents to ensure their children make the most of their iPads and tablets at home while staying safe online.

The result was an evening course that covered how to manage tablets and set up different restrictions to make them more secure for children to use, as well as exploring various free apps to encourage youngsters in educational use of their tablets and iPads.

In addition to providing parents with peace of mind that they can ensure their children stay safe online we wanted to make the session fun and interactive. We explored how to make puppet shows on the iPads and each group of parents produced their own little show about a Princess called Prudence and her handsome knight, Kevin! I wanted to show parents how easily their children can create exciting multimedia projects and use the iPad for learning as well as for games. We also explored augmented reality using children's own drawings and brought their artwork alive with video explanations from the children themselves.

The feedback from the session has been great – the school reports parents commenting on how useful they found the experience, and has gone on to set up a regular ICT evening club that is attended not only by parents but members of the wider community, as well as including ICT tips and app reviews in its newsletter.

Why seek to constantly reinvent the wheel when often a back to basics approach, focusing on the skills we have as teachers, can have the biggest impact?

For more ideas on how to engage parents in e-safety matters, take a look at the E-safety Support Parent Pack or if you are interested in running a parents’ workshop on e-safety, iPad skills or a host of other topics at your school? Contact Fantastict on 0800 030 5241. Don't forget, all E-safety Support Members qualify for a free needs analysis and Premium and Premium Plus members can also claim discount of Fantastict courses.

Written by Sally Tippett on April 02, 2014 07:59

Interpreting the Ofsted Requirements for E-safety - Part 2

This is the second in a series of blog posts focusing on Ofsted’s e-safety framework, which was first briefed to it’s inspectors in September 2012 and has had a number of amendments since then, the latest of which was published in January 2014.

In the last post, we concentrated on the large first section of the framework document, entitled ‘Whole School Consistent Approach’. In this article, we will look at the sections focusing on ‘Robust and Integrated Reporting Routines’ and ‘Staff’.

Robust and Integrated Reporting Routines

This section of the Ofsted e-safety framework focuses on schools’ online reporting procedures, emphasising that the whole school community should have a full and clear understanding about the processes available to them for the reporting of e-safety issues.

This can be demonstrated by:

  • schools utilising ‘abuse’ or ‘CEOP buttons on their websites, email systems or learning platforms.
  • schools making available and broadcasting awareness of specifically trained, nominated staff, that students can contact regarding any e-safety issue.
  • a school’s adoption of a web-based reporting tool such as SHARP (Student Help Advice Reporting Page System). This is a web-based tool that an increasing number of schools are investing in which allows young people to report any incidents which occur within the school and local community anonymously and without fear.
  • Information on indicators that Ofsted will be looking out for that will identify good or outstanding practice can be found here.

    Staff

    In this area of the framework Ofsted’s focus is targeted at the training teaching and non-teaching staff is receiving with regard to e-safety and whether this is regular and up-to-date. Also, whether at least one member of staff, within the school, has received accredited training, for example CEOP or EPICT.

    This can be demonstrated by:

  • Evidence that a Government-accredited training session has been delivered to at least one member of staff and that all stakeholders associated with the school, such as teachers, support staff, governors and parents/carers, including those in the local community where children attend (e.g. Libraries, Youth Centres, CLC, Youth Groups) have received regular training. This could be demonstrated by displaying certificates confirming the attendance at the session or documents held by management certifying that a session was indeed delivered. Ofsted will also question staff on e-safety to establish the effectiveness of the training sessions.

    There is an excellent online training module available to E-safety Support Premium Plus members covering all aspects of training for staff with regard to the Ofsted e-safety framework. Usage is unlimited and it comes complete with a distribution tool and also progress monitoring system. To find out more, view the e-safety training module demonstration video.

  • Evidence that children have a good awareness of e-safety, what they should do if they have an e-safety issue and can confidently mentor others in aspects of e-safety and the reporting of associated issues. Usually Ofsted will judge this via the questioning of individual and groups of students. There is a helpful document on the e-safetysupport website offering sample questions that Ofsted may ask students in order to judge the quality of e-safety teaching and a school’s e-safety promotion strategies.
  • Finally, there is another helpful document offering sample questions that Ofsted may ask staff in order to judge the effectiveness of e-safety training.
  • These are just some suggestions on how you may develop your e-safety provision. If you would like to share your thoughts on implementing e-safety policy and practice in your school, we would love to hear from you. Please use the comments form below.

    Further ideas on how to demonstrate key features of good and outstanding practice will be brought to you in future articles.

    Written by Steve Gresty on February 27, 2014 10:05


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