e-Safety – It won’t happen in my school!

This post was originally published in January 2012.

Last week (mid Jan 2012) saw the end of a serious case review of child sexual abuse in a school of the most diabolical of circumstances.  Described by a judge as a “paedophile of the most sickening order” he was jailed indefinitely last year after abusing five girls – some as young as six years old.  The fact that teaching staff raised serious concerns on numerous occasions and no action was taken makes this case even more shocking.

I would like to put two things straight before I continue with my rant:

1.  I’m not having a go at teachers – I have worked in schools for a number of years and have the utmost respect for the hard work teaching and support staff do.  My reference to schools in this blog post is only because of the work I do in schools.

2. The profile of the paedophile is that he or she will work where the child is, the obvious place being a school – that is a non arguable fact.

If you read the article you will know that Leat sometimes used a school digital camera and his own mobile phone.  Although the case has little to do with technology it does remind me of something I come across quite a lot – “it won’t happen in my school”.

As part of my consultancy work I sometimes get asked to produce an e-safety report at the request of a school.  The report is an action plan which is private to the school and doesn’t get shared with anyone; it concentrates on the governance, policy and liability in regards to e-safety.  For example ensuring that policies have covered any school liabilities, that all staff have received e-safety awareness training, discussing what training the lead e-safety officer has, ensuring the school knows what to do in case of an incident and much more.  Essentially it culminates in a detailed report with recommendations for the school in order to become “e-safety compliant” rather than just showing a few videos to the children.

In this context the “it won’t happen in my school” attitude for the most part comes from schools that are not using the educational potential of ICT for a variety of understandable reasons;  cost, lack of educational ICT awareness, and generally from people who see ICT as more of a hindrance than anything else.  This has a knock-on effect – children are not taught to risk assess what they are doing on the internet, staff are poorly trained in the principles of e-safety or more commonly not trained at all.

An example of the “it won’t happen….” attitude usually happens in my audit when I ask the question, “Do you use any behaviour management software in your school?”  Behaviour management software is designed to capture words or phrases of concern, and even image tones in pictures.  For example bullying, racial abuse, criminal activity, adult content and more.  One such example of this type of software is from Securus.  The most common answer is that the children are too young and wouldn’t do anything inappropriate.  Whilst that is true for the most part, the answer is fundamentally incorrect – how do you know what you don’t know?  But when I ask the question, “What about your staff?”, the answer I receive is, “My staff would not do anything inappropriate, it wouldn’t happen in my school”.

Of course we all trust our staff otherwise we wouldn’t employ them, but there is no room for complacency particularly where children are involved.  When I send my children to school I want to know firstly that they are safe, and secondly they are receiving an excellent education.  Safeguarding always comes first!

E-Safety is not all about showing the children a couple of videos from CEOP and job done, it is far more than that.  Safeguarding and e-safety is not about technology.  But, technology can be used to assist with e-safety, and e-safety is about safeguarding.

It is appalling cases such as the above which undermines the tremendous work of the majority of schools and teaching staff.  But more importantly my heartfelt prayers go out to the children and families that have been affected by this.  I hope one day to see the end of the “it won’t happen in my school” attitude!

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