All year groups learn about online safety at school as part of their computing lessons. On Safer Internet Day, we had assemblies and workshops to equip the children with tools to stay safe online.  We also had a presentation for parents. Here are some suggestions on how to promote online safety at home and the attachments show up to date web site links and support.

Parents/carers should discuss use of the internet with their children and take the opportunity to reinforce the national messages being provided by the school. The text below gives some ideas for parents to use when discussing and monitoring internet use with young people. It has been written in language which is accessible by young people so that it can serve as a prompt for opening up discussions between parents/carers and young people about the main issues.

Home Use of the Internet

Parents / carers should:

• Ensure that children access the internet in a communal room where they can be easily supervised
• Ensure appropriate supervision for the age of their children including supervising all use of the internet by younger users
• Ask their children about what sites they are looking at
• Ensure that family computers are password protected and have robust anti-virus software which is regularly updated
• Ensure content is appropriately filtered for younger users

Content – finding and publishing information on the internet

Parents / carers should:

• Ensure that their children know that they will only get to use the internet if they use it responsibly and that being responsible means they should not try to visit unsafe sites or register for things they are not old enough for
• Ensure that their children know that any protection system does not stop all unsafe content and that children need to tell them if they access something inappropriate
• Encourage children to search safely to find the information they want using very specific search terms to reduce the likelihood of accessing unsafe material
• Talk to children about the fact that any information published on the web can be read be anyone and that they should only publish information they would be happy for anyone to read
• Check information that younger users are publishing on the web before it is posted to ensure that they are not putting themselves in danger

Contact - Using technology to contact people

Parents / carers should:

• Discuss the need for young people to be polite to others online and that they should not use bad language or comments which might make others upset
• Discuss user names with children and talk about how to choose them carefully to protect their identity
• Talk to young people about the information they should keep private in order to prevent them being contacted or traced including, full name, address, telephone no, school, places they do regularly
• Talk to young people about the need to limit access to their own information by using the safety and privacy features of sites to only give access to people they know and being careful who they add as friends
• Discuss the fact that e-mails / messages can be intercepted and forwarded on to anyone (including parents, head teacher or future employer!)
• Ensure that young people know they should not open messages if the subject field contains anything offensive or if they do not recognise who it is from and that the safest thing to do is to delete it without opening it
• Ensure they know what to do if I receive an offensive message / e-mail including how to keep evidence and to tell their parent / appropriate adult
• Remind young people that people they talk to online may not be who they seem

Commerce - Using technology to for buying and selling

Parents/carers should:

• Help young people to tell the difference between web sites for information and web sites selling things
• Discuss how to recognise commercial uses of the internet e.g. I Tunes, mobile phone downloads, shopping
• Ensure that young people know not to leave computers logged on with their user name or logged on to sites with personal details entered as others could use them
• Remind young people that if an offer looks too good to be true it probably is and that they should not respond to unsolicited online offers
• Remind young people that they should not purchase or download anything that costs money without asking permission and that they should not use someone else’s identity to buy things online