At Sudbourne, the safety of all our children is paramount, most electronic equipment, such as Ipads, mobile phones and games consoles, have online access these days and it is our responsibility to teach the children how to use them safely.

Our Online Safety policy - see below - outlines how we proactively maintain online safety for all our uses at Sudbourne Primary. 

Our Computing Curriculum includes specific lessons on how children can keep themselves safe whilst using the internet.  We are also mindful of the importance of embedding safe internet use messages in our everyday interactions with children so that they can use these skills and apply their knowledge routinely in their everyday life.   

Top Tips for Online Safety at Home 

Turn on Google Safesearch: After you have done a search, you will see a button in the top right corner with a cog wheel on it. Click on that and a menu appears, with the option ‘Turn on Safesearch’ - enable that. This can easily be switched off again by you (or by a determined savvy child), but I think that if you sign in to Google (you need to sign up for a Google account to be able to do this if you don’t have one) then you can switch this on and whenever you are signed in it will be safe and only changeable by you.

Google Safesearch is pretty good as a first line of defence, but you still need to be vigilant.

Turn on Youtube Safety Mode: scroll to the bottom of a Youtube page and you will see in the grey area at the bottom a button that says ‘Safety’. Make sure it is switched to ‘On’. This will turn off all user comments (where lots of swearing etc goes on) but will not block all undesirable content.

Set up Internet Filtering: To avoid children accessing unsuitable websites you will need to set up a web filter. Your Internet Service Provider may have something that you can use, alternatively you can use a commercial product such as Mcafee or something like Open DNS which is free, run by a community of users and not too hard to set up. Once this is in place, you can configure it to allow or exclude whatever types of website you want (so for example you can exclude porn, but allow social media sites).

You might find this link useful too:

www.vpnmentor.com/blog/the-ultimate-parent-guide-for-child-internet/

Happy safe surfing!

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