Online Safety
Every day it seems our children spend more and more time online, so we recognise the need for schools, parents and carers to work together to take an active role in teaching children about online safety. Teaching students how to keep themselves safe when using the internet is an incredibly important part of safeguarding our children. Equally, if we are going to support them in this, it is also necessary for us to be well-informed. Often this involves learning about platforms that are very new and rapidly changing.
As a parent or carer, there are a few actions you can take to protect your children from the risks of the internet:
- Knowing what apps are installed on your child's mobile device
- Knowing the passcode to access their device, if needed
- Understanding that once content is shared with others, it can't be taken back
- Knowing who your children are talking to
National Online Safety
As well as taking these actions, it is also important for you as parents and carers to understand the online world children inhabit and for us to provide you with information to help you to protect your children online.
We are therefore delighted to announce that at Corby Technical School we have shown our commitment to protecting our pupils online by working with National Online Safety to provide high quality and frequently updated resources that are free for all our parents and carers to access.
The resources include online courses, online video resources and weekly guides covering a huge range of topics, including but not limited to:
|
|
To create your account, please click here and complete your details. When you’re set up, you’ll be able to set ‘Parent/Carer’ as your user type and all the resources will be freely accessible for you to use as it suits you.
You can access National Online Safety via any device- including via our brand-new smartphone app. To download the app, please choose the appropriate link below for your device:
Apple devices - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/national-online-safety/id1530342372
Android devices - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.nationaleducationgroup.nos
Online Safety in school:
As a technical school, we put a lot of emphasis on online safety and ensuring that the students understand the risks that the internet may bring.
We have online safety boards in all computer rooms so that students have access to information whilst actively on computers. We also have online safety assemblies which remind the students of the dangers which they face when publishing content online, particularly on social media websites. As well as assemblies, online safety is delivered as part of our computing curriculum and discussed within PSHE lessons.
As a school, we take preventative measures such as using filtering to block inappropriate websites on our computers, laptops and iPads. The internet usage within school is also monitored by a piece of software called Smoothwall. This will alert the safeguarding team of any inappropriate or concerning use of the computers in school. Staff can also make use of Impero to monitor screens during lessons, and our ICT suites are supervised by a member of staff throughout the day.
The use of mobile phones is also banned in school, which minimises any unsupervised access to the Internet whilst students are with us during the day.