There was a great article from TES today (31st Aug 2012) regarding internet filtering in scottish schools. The article quotes “…anger and frustration on the part of teachers – and a warning that by denying young people access to the kind of ICT to which they have easy access at home, schools are limiting the research skills and capacity of their pupils” – and I happen to agree.
This was also preceded by a tweet from somebody I follow who said that he wanted to use Google Apps in his school, but the service is blocked.
This is a real shame, there are some exceptional services available to schools for curriculum use, many of which are free – and that is important in this current climate.
The purpose of this particular blog is to give a pragmatic view from the angle of a school, and also from the angle of an LA. There are many misconceptions about filtering and some teachers may not realise that things can change.
First of all I’d like to qualify that this isn’t based on thought; it is based on fact and operational knowledge having managed school services for 350 schools for the last 6 years at a local authority. Managing these sorts of services is difficult; 350 schools have very wide and very varied opinions and it is a constant struggle to achieve the correct balance to please all, or the majority of schools. But an inescapable fact is that the balance can only be achieved by working very closely with schools, not by trying to predict what they want/need, or God forbid just telling them what they can/can’t have!
If you don’t know how internet filtering works you may like to have a quick read HERE, it is a very simple non-technical guide to the processes of internet filtering.
There are many ways in which internet filtering can be provisioned to schools. for the purpose of this exercise I will use an example of a standard setup: filtering is provided centrally from the LA, either by the LA or via an outsourced provider.
The school viewpoint
Teachers already have an incredibly difficult job trying to juggle the scores of things that need to be done every day. When in a lesson, you want and expect things just to work. You’re halfway through your lesson, you’ve set the scene and the resources, the children now go on the net to carry out the task or research and there it is, the dreaded BLOCKED message. You have to “contact your system administrator” to rectify it. You can’t, that means you have to leave the lesson, and even if you do it will take hours, days, weeks to get the site unblocked.
Moving on, you’ve discovered the power of social media in a curriculum context, you want to get the students blogging and tweeting. Sharing and working collaboratively across Google docs or using any number of cloud services for non personal data to save having to spend lots of money on servers and technicians to support the hardware. But you can’t, it’s blocked. It’s a security risk, a safeguarding risk, or even worse you just don’t get an answer or doubly even worse, “because we say so”.
What can you do?
The LA viewpoint.
The LA has to balance the needs of the school with the security and integrity of the network and its’ users. What normally happens is the LA will set a baseline standard. This means that certain categories will be automatically blocked; things like adult image, hate/race, gambling etc. Users will then be set up into groups, normally age-related. These groups will have increased (or decreased) access privileges for different categories.
It is at this point where the problems occur, for example:
- The filter is just left to do it’s own thing.
- Users/groups/schools are set up incorrectly.
- The provider doesn’t understand the needs of the schools.
- The provider is not forward thinking, not pro-actively looking at how emerging technologies and services are being used in schools.
- and much more……
What can they do?
Internet filtering software is reasonably intelligent, it does what you tell it to do, but no software is capable of making a human decision. For example if a school is researching World War II, and perhaps researching Jews and Nazis, the filter quite correctly categorises that site as Race/Hate, and therefore it is blocked. That’s pretty unhelpful to a teacher who has spent hours preparing lesson plans and resources, usually from home where everything is likely to be unblocked. But that isn’t the fault of the filter or the LA.
So what can be done about this?
Nothing is ever going to be perfect, but these days any good filtering service is highly configurable and a lot can be done to ease the pain.
Firstly the LA (or provider) must understand how technology is used in an education environment. This includes newer technologies such as tablets, smartphones, cloud working etc.
Secondly, filtering must be “managed”; that means that constant changes must be made in response to school needs.
Thirdly, the LA must work with schools. There has to be interaction as to what is working and what isn’t.
Last but by no means least, schools must work with the LA; unless you tell them they won’t know what difficulties you are experiencing.
With regard to social networking and other similar services, this is an interesting one. I have heard many horror stories which are not for this blog, but let me tell you how I managed this.
Social networking is blocked! What? Why? Social networking is blocked because many schools want nothing to do with social networking. Rightly or wrongly that is a fact. To unblock it centrally would mean that all social networking services are opened to all schools and that’s not what we want. HOWEVER…..remember I said that all good filtering products these days are highly configurable? Well, this is just one instance. Any school that wants any particular service opened up for that particular school only has to ask the Servicedesk. That school is reminded of its responsibility and liability, the Headteacher signs it off, and the service is “whitelisted” for that school.
This means it is “managed”. In other words it isn’t simply opened or blocked for everyone, those that want it can have it. Want Facebook? Done. Twitter? Done. Google Apps? Done……and much more.
The stance I have always taken is this: who am I, a non-educator, to tell a school what it can or can’t have. I am there to support, advise and work with the schools. As long as I can ensure the security and integrity of the network then it is extremely rare for something to be declined. If the Servicedesk has to decline something, it would be passed to me for final decision and to engage and discuss with the school.
That’s the way I work, but I am aware that others don’t necessarily agree with that.
So finally, if you can’t get what you want or need, what can you do?
The best piece of advice I can give is this; as the school you are the customer (I don’t like that word but bear with me). You pay for the service one way or another; either directly to a supplier or as top-sliced devolved schools grant at the LA. Therefore as the paying customer what would you do if somebody says you can’t have something you need? You would either leave or complain.
Also remember this, it is a service provided to you. As a provided service it has a Service Level Agreement. This SLA should state how schools request changes, how long those changes should take (if I remember correctly Becta required no longer than 20 minutes), and lots more. If there is no SLA in place, why? How can you pay for something that isn’t monitored (from a service management perspective) as to whether it is working or not?
Your first step has got to be to engage with the LA to find out why. “You just can’t” is not a reason, it is an excuse. “Because it’s a security problem” is not a reason. There are usually ways and means around these problems.
If you get nowhere, and it is a common issue, engage with your School Forum. Different counties have different names for this body, but essentially they are a select group of head teachers who meet with the LA, usually termly, to discuss strategic school issues. If your curriculum is being affected, if you can’t do things you want or need to do, that’s an issue as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks for getting this far. I would love to hear your good stories, your horror stories, or what you think about filtering in general. Leave a comment below or feel free to email me: alan@esafety-adviser.com
I disagree. No scholarly site should be blocked by an Internet filter. If the filter blocks legitimate sites regarding Holocaust because they contain “bad words”, then the filter is doing more harm than good, and it should be discontinued.
The simple solution is to put teachers in control of internet filtering for their own classrooms. Let the teacher enter a password to disable filtering for the duration of the lesson.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for your comment. I don’t disagree with what you have said, however that isn’t the way an internet filter works. Bearing in mind the filter is just a piece of software – using the example of the holocaust the filter can (but not always) categorise the site as racial hatred. That is not incorrect, however you are completely correct when you say it could be a scholarly site. This is where I say that there has to be human intervention; a piece of software cannot a human decision.
Your example of putting teachers in control is one such solution to this. Bearing in mind my blog has used a very simple generic example of filtering managed from a central enterprise, i.e. the local authority, one other example is to devolve the management to the school. The school can then make the decision to devolve the responsibility to a person or persons. This is where I mentioned that filters are highly configurable; this is completely possible. However in all my experience the large majority of primary schools do not want this sort of granular control, mainly because they see it as “too techie” or more understandably that they haven’t got time.
You mention disabling filtering for the duration of a lesson. In an ideal world I would agree with what you say, but I normally don’t advise that. I’ll give you an example why, a true story of something that happened about a year ago. A primary school had local control of their filtering. In this school there were two policies in place; one for staff and one for students (when I say policies, these are the instructions to the filter of what is allowed and what isn’t). The staff policy had exceptionally low level of filtering which included allowing some categories which ordinarily shouldn’t be allowed. One day the teacher gave the children some work to do on their PC’s. A couple of the children had forgotten their password so the teacher told all the children to use hers. She had to nip out of the classroom for a couple of minutes; when she came back in the children were viewing adult material on YouTube.
Now clearly this was a password issue, and an issue with the teacher telling the children to use her password. But the consequences of not having a filter do its job (rightly or wrongly) could have been extremely bad. The liability to the school could have been enormous. All the parents had to be told, etc. etc.
I have many examples such as this. Again I don’t disagree with what you are saying. In part the point of this blog was to give a better understanding of the limitations of a piece of software which is expected to do a human job.
I’m afraid I have to disagree, although this is an extremely well written and informative post nevertheless. My own view is that filtering is an unnecessary expense, as it works from a now fundamentally flawed premise that filtering actually works. Most kids in the upper primary and secondary stages can now show you how to use a proxy to get round filtering, and most could simply pull out out their smartphones and use 3G to access any site they want. Younger kids should be supervised anyway. In LA’s where filtering has been removed, there have been few or no incidents. We should learn from this and perhaps concentrate on teaching responsible use instead. Much more effective for life skills education anyway.
Hi Jaye,
Thanks for your comment. I pretty much agree entirely with you. I don’t think filtering will go away for some time; the purpose of the post was to try and raise awareness and hopefully make it easier for some users.
Without doubt, there should never be any question that education is everything and responsible use should be a fundamental part of any ICT use. I have been a staunch supporter of that for a very long time. You may have seen recently that Ofsted have finally caught onto this and the framework for inspection has increased the pressure on schools in this respect. Interestingly Ofsted also require appropriate age-related filtering. I’m not saying I agree with that, but if I can make life simpler for a few teachers by helping them to understand then I’m happy.
I have blogged elsewhere on this site that one of the blocks to allow schools to be filter-free is the legal duty of care required by the school (and the LA). In other words the risk assessment of what “could” happen. If there is a foreseeability that internet use could be used inappropriately (whether it happens or not) then there is a requirement to mitigate against the likelihood. That mitigation is filtering and education.
Regarding LA’s where filtering has been removed. That is interesting, I don’t know of any LA’s who have removed filtering, but I do know of LA’s that have removed the centralised filtering; in other words it is up to the school to purchase the appropriate filtering that they want/need. If you know of LA’s that have removed entirely would it be possible to let me know?
Thanks again Jaye.