At St Michael’s we understand the dangers that using the internet can create, we are committed to ensuring our students have the full knowledge to keep themselves safe, we also provide additional support to parents to help them monitor the use of the internet and education their children at home about safe internet usage.

E-Safety is taught to all students; explaining and demonstrating how to stay safe and behave appropriately online. This is done extensively in IT lessons and reinforced throughout the years through PSHE, assemblies, PSHE Values days, Internet safety day and through other curriculum areas. However, we can only be successful in keeping children safe online if we work with parents to ensure the e-Safety message is consistent. We also offer termly E-safety workshops for parents to give the most relevant and up to date information regarding e-safety.

Key Stage 3

• E-safety rules – students create a notice/poster with a list of appropriate rules/guidelines to follow
• Benefits/Drawbacks of social media
• How to create an effective password that your friends can’t guess
• What to include on social media sites that is appropriate – group discussions and written work
• What not to include on social media sites – group discussion and written work

• Watch videos of both girls and boys using social media arranging to meet adults posing as young people – group discussion and written work of the mistakes the young people made and how to avoid them
• Group discussion of potential scenarios and how to avoid these escalating
• Who to report any worries/issues to – family, teachers, friends, CEOP site etc.
• PSHE module on Cyber Bullying

Key Stage 4

• Similar work to Key Stage 3
• Section in written exams around use of ICT in society, social media etc.
• PSHE CEOP training session – Sexual exploitation

Across all key stages:

• Anti-Bullying week assemblies focusing on all aspects of bullying including Cyber bullying.
• RASA Assemblies on CSE

Parents and carers

•  A termly information session is presented to parents and carers in KS3, this gives parents the key information regarding the latest Apps, gaming and social media and how they can keep their children safe online.

Useful websites to help keep your children safe:

Tips for keeping safe online.

• Communication with your children is key to helping them keep themselves safe, keep a healthy dialog with your child about the apps, website and games they access online.
• Consider locating your computer or mobile devices in a family area where children’s online activity can be monitored or supervised.
• Talk to your child and ask them to show or even teach you how they use the internet and learn about websites.
• Make sure your child knows it’s important that they tell an adult (parent, form tutor, Head of Year) they trust if anything happens online that makes them feel scared, worried or uncomfortable.
• Remind children that they should use the same caution online as they would in the real world. Tell them they should never go to meet someone they have only spoken to online or give out personal information online.
• Install antivirus software and keep it up to date, secure your internet connection and use Parental Control functions for computers, mobile phones and games consoles to block unsuitable content or contact.
• Familiarise yourself with the age limits of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram etc. There’s an age limit in place for a reason, if you decide to allow your children on to these sites make sure you know how they can protect themselves while using these sites – for example knowing how to set appropriate privacy settings.
• If you or your child are in immediate danger call 999.

School network Safety

We back-up our teaching by implementing sytems to protect our students and staff while accessing the internet on the curriculum school IT network. We have a three phase protection system.

Phase One

St. Michael's subscribes to the LEA web safety and filtering option. This provides St. Michael's with web and firewall protection, from spyware and viruses it also identifies websites that are deem inapropriate for viewing within a school, by headings, groups of words, or individual words. The LEA provides the school access to there software called Smoothwall which has a central pool of white and black listed sites that are provided by governing bodies and the schools that subscribe to the LEA policy option.

Phase two

St. Michael's has an additional web filtering server within the curriculum network which is linked to the LEA. This gives us the option to tailor web filtering specifically to our needs and immediate access to ban or lift access to all or part of a websites. We also have the capabilities of creating groups of users and giving those groups different levels of access. We currently have Staff, students, 6th Form and Admin groups with different levels of access.

Phase three

The school also runs software on the curriculum network to protect against virus and spyware attack. We have installed ESET to protect the users and PC's from threat and harm. In addition to ESET we also use Impero which has a dual function of classroom support as well as protection against inapropriate web access.

Alll of the above provide us with logs of potential threats as well as inapropriate web access. The systems prompt the technicians of potential issues which are then checked, banned or allowed then subsequently they notify the e-safety team or individual user.

Definitions

Web Filter

A Web filter is a program that can screen an incoming Web page to determine whether some or all of it should not be displayed to the user. The filter checks the origin or content of a Web page against a set of rules provided by company or person who has installed the Web filter. A Web filter allows an enterprise or individual user to block out pages from Web sites that are likely to include objectionable advertising, pornographic content, spyware, viruses, and other objectionable content.

Firewall

In computing, a firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules. A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted, secure internal network and another outside network, such as the Internet, that is assumed not to be secure or trusted. Firewalls are often categorized as either network firewalls or host-based firewalls. Network firewalls filter traffic between two or more networks; they are either software appliances running on general purpose hardware, or hardware-based firewall computer appliances. Host-based firewalls provide a layer of software on one host that controls network traffic in and out of that single machine.