Calne Area Heads - working together to support pupils and parents with online safety

This is an enormous challenge and something that we work on with children throughout their time in school. We are living in an ever changing world, and sometimes it can be difficult for parents to keep up with technology and what their children are accessing online. Each term, we will focus on a different area of online safety and provide links to support parents. It is down to all of us to support and educate the next generation. Online safety education must be a two way partnership and we need to work together with parents to be able to have a significant impact. We are aware that when children use technology in school the filtering systems we use mean that it is very unlikely that children will access inappropriate or illegal material, however we know that this is more of a challenge when children outside of school.

This term, we are focusing on social media; TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram to name but a few. Whilst social media can be a fantastic tool for connecting people, it can be a very toxic world. Many of these platforms have an age suggestion related to them – generally 13 years old. This is for good reason. Children are often able to access a wider world where they often don’t know the people they are communicating with. There have been several high profile cases of online safety over recent months. Children are growing up in a world that isn’t designed for them. If a child is 8 years old and has a social media profile, it is assumed that they are 13. This means by the time they reach 13, the platform will think they are 18 years old. Then they are open to completely inappropriate content for their age; gambling, pornography etc. We need to protect our children from these areas until they are sufficiently old enough to be able to process them appropriately.

The following resource is a great starting point for finding out more about social media and how you can support your child.

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/social-media/