The e-Safety Policy is vitally important in school for a number of reasons, including:
- To ensure there is a clear and consistent approach responding to incidents.
- To ensure that every person responsible for the children is fully aware of his/her responsibilities.
- To set boundaries of use (goalposts) of any school owned IT equipment, or personal IT equipment used in the school.
The following is a short “10 top tips” for creating your e-safety policy in school. There are many more, but these are some of the common ones that schools miss:
- Clear – there should be no room for error. Your e-safety policy is a safeguarding policy, not an IT policy.
- Concise – do you need a 3 page introduction telling staff how important IT is across the curriculum?
- Plain english – your e-safety policy will be read by a wide audience; having worked at a local authority for many years it still baffles me why people write policies requiring a doctorate in english to understand.
- How many policies? – an internet policy, acceptable use policy, social media policy, iPad policy, blogging policy, what socks shall I wear on Thursdays policy. Okay, I’m being a bit pedantic, but you get my drift. There’s no need for all these policies. Despite the work to develop and review all of these, you run the risk of missing something, creating confusion, or even worse contradictory statements. Your e-safety policy includes (or should include) all of the above.
- Device agnostic – where possible keep technology out of it. Only mention specific devices if you really need to. You’ve got iPads in your school, that’s okay, the e-safety risks and issues are no different to PC’s and laptops so why specifically mention iPads or have a different iPad policy?
- Going back to point 5, there is nothing wrong with having a list of devices at the back that are used in school. This is so that all staff are left in no doubt, but if you are going to include one, include them all: PC’s; laptops, mobile devices, phones, cameras etc.
- Include your Staff Acceptable Use and Student Acceptable Use policies inside your e-Safety Policy. These don’t have to be separate policies, they are part of the same thing. Essentially your Acceptable Use Policy is a “pull-out” reference sheet. Think of your Acceptable Use Policy as the Highway Code, where your e-safety policy is the Road Traffic Act.
- Boundaries of use – your e-safety policy must set all the boundaries for both school-owned IT equipment used on or off-site and personally owned IT equipment used on school premises. (Note: on school premises, in this context, includes school trips etc.)
- One of the fundamental reasons for an e-safety policy is to ensure that any risk of liability to the school is low, by ensuring the school sets boundaries and the staff and children adhere to those boundaries. One such example is use of social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) by staff in a personal context. Your Head and/or Governing Body may stipulate that staff are never to mention the school name, staff names etc when using social media.
- Things to include – a small list of important bits of the e-Safety Policy that should be included, but are regularly missed:
- Risk assessment template – any introduction of any new technology (whether device or service) must be risk assessed against the foreseeability of any risk.
- Flowcharts – what to do in a given incident.
- Training – who (as in staff, governing body, parents, key stage etc.) has been trained, when, what did it include, when is the next update planned?
- How to report an incident – whether you need to make an internal report or external report. Make clear under what circumstances you need to make a report, who to (by name if internal, agency if external) and include details of how (i.e. contact details, web address).
There are lots more, but the ones above are the ones that are commonly missed. Don’t forget, there is no such thing as an e-safety policy standard.
A model policy template, along with risk assessment and parental letter templates can be downloaded (free) from my main site HERE.
In the meantime if you would like to offer some more tips on your e-safety policy I look forward to seeing them.
Thanks for reading, best wishes.
Alan Mackenzie
alan@esafety-adviser.com