Online Safety
At Highfields we strive to help keep your child stay safe online. The most important piece of advice we could give is to be as involved as possible with your child’s online activity. If you don’t understand what they are doing, ask them to explain it. If they are actively interested in something online, show interest and see if you can get involved too – can you play their game with them? Set rules and boundaries for the online or virtual world, just as you would in the real world and put in place ways that you can check that these are being followed.
How we keep your child safe online at Highfields
The school’s focus on the use of the internet and digital technologies is always to educate students about the use and risks involved, but we do have clear guidelines in place to regulate and monitor internet access in school. We operate on a Smoothwall firewall and filtering system to ensure that we have a safe digital learning environment with real-time, content aware and granular control filtering. The school also operates Google Safe Search as an automated filter of potentially offensive content. Highfields applies Safe Search to any device connected to the school network and on any school provided device, this applies both in and outside of school.
What you can do
As much as these levels of filtering work as a good deterrent when at home, from experience, we have seen that students like to push the boundaries of firewalls and attempt to circumnavigate them. We suggest that you review your home broadband and find a level of control and filtering that works for you.
These controls are designed to help parents and carers manage their child's online activities. Many of the more popular broadband providers (e.g. Sky/Virgin) do provide with free parental controls to lock down inappropriate websites, as well as paid for applications for an even greater product offering home control, filtering and monitoring. These don’t replace the need for support and advice, so, similar to how we in school promote educating about the online world, it is important for you to also talk to your children about staying safe online and make sure they know that they can turn to you if they get into any difficulty.
Have an ongoing conversation and continue to talk about the apps, games and sites they like to use, and what they like and don’t like and any concerns about being online. Discuss with them when to unfollow, block or report. For help starting this conversation, read having a conversation with your child.
Talk about how their online actions can affect others. If your child is engaging with peers online, remind them to consider how someone else might feel before they post or share something. Be non-judgemental and explain that you would never blame them for anything that might happen online, and you will always give them support.
Further information regarding home filtering:
If you have any immediate Online Safety concerns that could be a safeguarding risk, email safeguardinghighfields@hswv.co.uk or report online to CEOP’s Child protection advisors.
For more information on Online Safety at Highfields please refer to our Online Safety Policy.
