Implementing Filtering and Monitoring in your School

 The UK Safer Internet Centre has conducted webinars on behalf of the Department for Education to assist organisations in England with their filtering and monitoring responsibilities.

The purpose was to prepare schools for the upcoming changes in Keeping Children Safe in Education (September 2023) and the new filtering and monitoring standards introduced earlier in the year.

To ensure you are fulfilling your responsibilities in this area I wanted to summarise the four standards that schools, and college must meet. These include the following:

Strand 1 – Identify and Assign Roles and Responsibilities

The senior leadership team are responsible for:

• procuring filtering and monitoring systems
• documenting decisions on what is blocked or allowed and why
• reviewing the effectiveness of your provision
• assigning key roles to appropriate personnel
• overseeing reports

The DSL team are responsible for:

• monitoring filtering and monitoring reports
• safeguarding concerns
• checks to filtering and monitoring are happening

The IT team are responsible for:

• Maintain filtering and monitoring systems
• Provide filtering and monitoring reports
• Complete actions following concerns or checks to systems

The Governors are responsible for:

• Reviewing the strategic approach to effective monitoring and filtering in schools and colleges.

Strand 2 – review your filtering and monitoring systems at least annually

• related safeguarding or technology policies and procedures
• roles and responsibilities
• training of staff
• curriculum and learning opportunities
• procurement decisions
• how often and what is checked
• monitoring strategies

Strand 3 – filtering system should block harmful and inappropriate material/content without limiting teaching and learning

• filter all internet feeds, including any backup connections
• be age and ability appropriate for the users, and be suitable for educational settings
• handle multilingual web content, images, common misspellings and abbreviations
• identify technologies and techniques that allow users to get around the filtering such as VPNs and proxy services and block them
• provide alerts when any web content has been blocked

Strand 4 – effective monitoring for safeguarding needs

• Review the effectiveness of your systems and report any actions
• Be confident that your staff (including IT staff) are confident in reporting
• Are mobile phones and other devices secure?
• Ensure adequate supervision

While emphasising the need to limit exposure to online risks, the guidance cautions against "over blocking" to avoid unreasonable restrictions on teaching and safeguarding. Ofsted have found that schools with "managed" systems provided better knowledge and understanding of online safety compared to those with "locked down" systems, which limited students' opportunities to learn how to assess and manage risks independently.

Having these in place will ensure that you comply with the new changes. I recommend the following site for further support and guidance: https://saferinternet.org.uk/guide-and-resource/teachers-and-school-staff/appropriate-filtering-and-monitoring . 

I also recommend a very useful website for checking your systems: https://testfiltering.com/

My final note is that there is so much harmful content available on line. No filtering and monitoring system can be 100% effective, but if we have the right practices and procedures in place in our settings we can protect our children and vulnerable people in society.

SWGfL Webinars: https://swgfl.org.uk/resources/filtering-and-monitoring/

Gov.uk https://www.gov.uk/guidance/meeting-digital-and-technology-standards-in-schools-and-colleges/filtering-and-monitoring-standards-for-schools-and-colleges