Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) states ‘schools and colleges should consider carrying out an annual review of their approach to online safety’: To help support schools, edtech charity, LGfL-The National Grid for Learning has developed a free Online Safety Audit to reflect changes to the DfE Standards for filtering and monitoring.
The downloadable Word document has two broad sections with questions on: Curriculum, General Approach & Communication; and Safe School Systems – technology for safeguarding and safeguarding for technology. Responses to the questions are rated red-amber-green (RAG) along with annotated evidence and actions.
Duvessa Brown, Deputy Headteacher and DSL at Wallington County Grammar School in South London, said: “As someone who isn’t IT savvy, when the IT department said, ‘Let’s do an audit’, I felt a bit worried, a bit out of my depth. But actually, I understood the audit, it was super easy to do, and I wish I had done it a lot sooner. We literally downloaded the Online Safety Audit from the LGfL website – we didn’t have to amend it, we just adapted it for our school. Unlike other audits we had previously used, this one covered all aspects of school life.
“We could clearly see what was in place and what still needed to be done. We looked at our filtering systems; student access to Wi-Fi in school and the dangers of that; and the curriculum and what each department was doing linked to e-safety. When we had the Ofsted inspection, our online safety audit basically provided a pile of evidence to say look at what we do. The inspector was very impressed by the level of detail.”
Alex Dave, Safeguarding Education Officer, LGfL, added: “The audit should be led by the DSL, as they have ‘lead responsibility for safeguarding and child protection (including online safety and understanding…filtering and monitoring…)’ DfE, KCSIE (2024). We recommend you link or integrate the audit into your overall Section 175/157 Local Authority (LA) safeguarding audit; and use the filtering and monitoring sections to fulfil your requirement (as per the DfE standards) for an annual filtering and monitoring review. This not only saves time, but above all ensures an integrated, whole-school approach. Work with colleagues across your school to complete the Audit (curriculum leads, IT support, cybersecurity leads, senior leaders etc) and don’t forget to share the results with your school governors and/or trustees.”
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
