This post is in response to Tom Barrett’s blog here
A very well written piece about filtering, and personally I don’t think it is an issue that will ever settle down due to the wide ranging views. Personally I could not ever agree with an unfiltered school connection, not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t believe we can – I’ll explain further shortly. I posted a blog recently where I briefly discussed schools managing a filtered internet – https://www.esafety-adviser.com/blog – to me that is a fundamental piece of the safeguarding jigsaw that is missing for a number of reasons in the large majority of schools I have visited.
I have been a Service Manager in a large UK local authority with a focus on schools, and therefore the responsibility for filtering lay with me. I have always believed that schools know best – therefore in the context of this discussion if a school asked our support provider for a particular site to be unblocked for any reason, my instruction was “unless there is any legal, safeguarding or security issue that cannot be mitigated against then the site is to be opened”. The problem with this approach is that when you open for one school, you open for all (depending on how policies, groups etc are set up). Therefore, a school could phone up and say they want the same site blocked. A good example of this would be a legitimate educational gaming site. Many schools simply will not allow gaming sites in their school, even if the sites are for educational purposes.
To overcome this, the filtering solution used allows schools to take local control of their own filtering. This allows schools to override the LA settings and manage their filtering properly in accordance with their own needs and wants. All secondary schools have taken this up, one primary school out of over 300 has taken this up.
In discussions with many of the primary schools, they simply do not want the extra burden of responsibility, and this is perfectly understandable. Yet will still complain that the LA filtering is too restrictive (which it isn’t).
In a roundabout way, this brings me back to why I do not believe we can have unfiltered access. Firstly, I don’t think our culture is ready for it. By that I mean that despite the work of Becta and many other agencies, some schools just don’t get e-safety. To them it is a technical issue rather than a safeguarding one. Actually the issue is one of governance, policy, procedure and education.
To those schools who do allow unfiltered access and say they don’t have a problem, I would ask, “how do you know?” I’ll give a true example going back 3 years of one student who was trying to access i_n_c_e_s_t sites (I’ve spelt it that way to stop all the inappropriate spammers). This young person had typed in the address of 20 of these sites, in other words he knew what he was looking for, he hadn’t searched for them. Thankfully the IWF blacklist kicked in and he couldn’t access any of the sites. I called the Headteacher to make him aware of this very concerning behaviour. His answer? “Is he doing that again? I’ll get his class teacher to have a word with him.” Suffice to say, I reported the matter to Safeguarding! Another example would be of a primary teacher who gave her username and password to all her class so that they could get onto YouTube (our filters allow for staff access). When she had returned from making a cup of coffee she was horrified to see the children watching an extremely graphic movie – not as horrified as the parents were!
To summarise, should we allow unfiltered access within schools? Yes, in my opinion. Teachers should be allow to teach, they know best and we should not be seeing these forced restrictions. Can we have unfiltered connections? No, the culture is not there, the knowledge is sparse, and the vicarious liability to the school is too great.
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