Online Safety Weekly Update - 10th September 2025

Welcome to this first weekly newsletter of the new term. I hope you are keeping well and managed to catch some of the lovely summer weather we’ve had over this last few weeks.

I managed to take a couple of weeks off and travelled to the Lake District for a few nights then onwards to the beautiful Scottish Borders. Chilled, relaxed, refreshed!

But the world of online safety never stands still, coming home and trying to catch up on new Generative AI developments I felt as though I’d been away for a year. It’s ridiculously fast moving at the moment and we’re no doubt in a new era of safeguarding, akin to when social media as we know it today first started to appear in the early 2000’s. At that time we had little idea about how much harm would be unleashed on our children and you would have hoped lessons would have been learnt – sadly it appears not.

We’re already seeing lots of lawsuits against tech companies and their lack of suitable guardrails which, when it comes to children, are often an afterthought. It’s interesting to see that OpenAI (ChatGPT) are going to be releasing further protection measures for children, including allowing parents to link to their child’s ChatGPT account (reported in The Guardian HERE) and, supposedly, a new model that is more child friendly. My question here is whether this is a new model built from the ground up for children, or is it an iteration of one of the old models with other guardrails in – my suspicion is the former but time will tell.

From AI generated mis/disinformation as a gateway to many different harms, using AI to create indecent images and so much more it’s important we take a victim-based approach with students of all ages: helping them to understand the technology from the positive and negative aspects and providing guidance and support about what to do if something goes wrong. This needs to be a big part of this school year.

Updates

Policy Review.
New free resources.
Omegle V2?
For parents – talking to your child about online safety.
For parents – misleading app and game age ratings.

Policy Review

We all know that policies need to be reviewed regularly to ensure we are doing all that we should be doing, and also to keep up with new advancement in technology, including Generative AI.

As always, London Grid for Learning lead the way when it comes to policy templates and these have been updated for Sept 2025. If you’re due to carry out a review, or even if you have already reviewed, it’s worth having a quick look through to make sure you haven’t missed anything. The templates include:

School online safety policy.
KS1 and KS2 AUP.
Parents AUP.
Staff, governors and volunteers.
Visitors and contractors AUP.
Social media.
AUP in symbols for pupils with SEND.

You can download all the policy templates HERE.

Something I was seeing a lot more of during the summer break – smart glasses, e.g, the RayBan/Meta partnership smart glasses which you can see HERE. These are capable of recording audio/video and potentially a significant safeguarding risk. I remember a few years ago when giving a parent talk in a school, I noticed I was being recorded without permission. I only noticed because a tiny red flashing light kept catching my attention coming from the shirt pocket of a male in the audience – he was using a pen recorder.

New Free Resources

Common Sense Media have released some new resources for the classroom. There are resources for Early Years, Primary and Secondary ages, although I’m not sure if the latter are new. A lot of topics are covered for every year group, even if you don’t want to use the resources they may give you inspiration for your own lessons/talks.

Please note you do need to create a free account to view the resources, you can find the Early Years and Primary HERE, secondary resources are HERE.

Also, you may already be aware of all the resources from the Australian e-Safety Commissioner which you can find HERE. I know they’re not UK specific but I think they’re really good and again they can just be viewed for inspiration.

Omegle V2?

Remember Omegle? That website which allowed anyone to talk with anyone live on camera and was the direct cause for so much child harm. It was eventually ordered to be taken down by a judge in the US last year.

Now there’s OmeTV (Omegle TV). I don’t know how long this has been out, at least a year, and unsurprisingly it’s hitting the headlines. Rated at 18+ in the Google Play Store (link HERE) and 17+ in the Apple App Store with few safeguards in place it’s another one of these chat apps which matches the user with complete strangers.

Definitely one to keep an eye on and good to see the e-Safety Commissioner in Australia is taking enforcement action.

For Parents – Talking to your Child about Online Safety

It’s the area that a lot of parents struggle with yet it is the single most important aspect for any child of any age – continuing conversations with children to mitigate risk, including topics that can be very difficult to approach.

The NSPCC has some wonderful resources for parents including age-appropriate conversations and topics, top tips, quizzes and more. There’s a lot of information and my tip would be to send out snippets of information, perhaps in your newsletter. For example you could say that in lessons with the children you’ve been having some lessons around how to stay safe online (with specific topics), then send out information just related to that topic. Parents are much more likely to read that, which in turn means they’re more likely to talk to their children about it.

You can find all the resources listed HERE.

For Parents – Misleading App and Game Age Ratings

I covered this topic within my very last weekly email in July but thought it worth mentioning again as it was so close to the end of term – it’s a topic that continually comes up when I talk with parents.

For some time it has been well known that age ratings within stores (e.g. Apple Store, Google Play) have been very misleading and don’t reflect that actual age requirements of the app or, occasionally, the game. For example in the Google Play store WhatsApp is rated at PEGI 3 – it isn’t even a game! Not only is this confusing for parents, it can also be very confusing for younger children who may think they can download and use the app.

It’s worth sending out this press release to parents to make them aware and if they’re unsure of any age requirements to simply Google it or do a search and find on ‘age’ within the terms and conditions document.

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