Online Safety Weekly Update – 5th November 2025

Professional Curiosity

An article on LinkedIn caught my attention a couple of days ago. Written by Kirra Pendergast it explains the awful incident of a 14 year old victim from Greater Manchester who was groomed and exploited. The emphasis in the article is about a couple of things: firstly the offender had a number of different personas online whom he ‘introduced’ to the victim, essentially creating a friendship group. Secondly, the offending happened over multiple social platforms, and here’s the crux – despite all the moderation not a single platform raised a red flag.

When investigating something it isn’t always obvious, we look for patterns, something that doesn’t feel quite right, or out of the ordinary. The problem with this series of incidents and many like it are that conversations jump from platform to platform making moderation very difficult, but there would have been indicators, signals that something isn’t right.

As Kirra quite rightly points out in the article, banks and others share fraud signals between them within minutes, accounts are flagged for suspicious activity globally. Despite all their money and tech knowledge social media platforms do not, there is no platform-to-platform sharing of suspicious activity which could have prevented this and many other terrible incidents from happening.

So what does this mean in school? Obviously it’s vastly different and it’s a whole lot easier. In lots of safeguarding training and in formal documentation there are lists of things to be aware of. These can be useful, knowledge is power, but no-one can remember all the lists and acronyms. I’ve recently had to re-do my annual personal safety training and first-aid at work refresher for my Police work, both of which were stuffed full of lists and acronyms, many of which made no sense whatsoever and there’s no way I’m going to remember them. The most powerful thing of all is the simplest one – professional curiosity. It’s something we need to keep re-iterating to staff and reming them that if something doesn’t sound right, doesn’t feel right, it gets your spidey senses tingling – report it to the DSL. That one piece of information you have may be a part a bigger jigsaw puzzle.

You can read the original article HERE.

For Parents – Should I Use Screentime as a Reward?

It’s such a difficult one for parents, we’re living in a time where screen use starts at a very early age. But should we use screen time to support positive behaviours or even take away screens as a punishment? The answer is that there is no single answer, it very much depends on individual circumstances, but it was a question posed to some experts on Internet Matters which will hopefully give parents some food for thought.

You can share the article with parents from the Internet Matters website HERE.