|
 Understanding E Safety and Managing the Risks is a guide for schools in developing an e-safety strategy.
The Head of Children’s services and the Headteacher are both personally and legally responsible for the (e)safety of all members of the school community.
The above sentence is the most powerful tool to focus a school’s leadership team on addressing the challenge of e-safety and understanding it cannot be left solely to an ICT coordinator or network manager. The reality is; the headteacher could lose their job, pension and home in the event that a legal action was pursued and they were found to be negligent.
Technology has developed and continues to evolve at an incredible pace – leaving many of us struggling to keep up. Those of us who worked with children 10 years ago would have doubted that a decade later, even very young children would own their own personal mobile phone with internet access, and incorporating a still and video camera capable of taking images of a higher quality than the school or family video equipment. It is not only children who have access to these new ‘communication’ technologies, adults too are communicating in ways very different than those imagined just a few years ago. Parents, teachers, carers and governors may all be using email, Bluetooth, instant messaging, social network sites, mobile technologies. These people too need to learn how to stay safe at work and in their personal lives.
The advances in technology have brought exciting and innovative tools to teaching and learning. It is important to keep a clear perspective on this subject. Today, students and teachers can easily create multimedia resources, communicate in real time, any time, any place, and anywhere. This represents tremendous opportunities for personalised learning. Students can access information, create and represent their ideas in a digital form that best suits their learning styles.
We cannot, and nor would we wish to, stop advances in technology and in the same way we cannot and should not prevent any member of our learning community from having access to these enabling resources. It is the purpose of this document to help schools to recognise, understand and manage the risks around using technologies in school and at home.
It is not possible to create a 100% safe environment and it is the school’s responsibility to demonstrate that they have managed the risks and to have done everything that could be reasonably expected of them to protect the users and the school. The school that is seen to have managed the risks will have policies, practices and infrastructure developed and regularly reviewed to ensure they meet the needs of their specific learning community.
Files to Download
| File | Description | File size |
|---|
 Download document | Understanding E-Safety & Managing the Risks Guidance Document | 853 Kb |
|
Labels: