Boosting online safety in education

Boosting online safety in education

Online Safety is a vital part of an education setting's safeguarding strategy. Legislation and inspection spotlight an organisation's ability to keep children and staff safe online. Recognising, responding and dealing with these online issues can be challenging.

That's why we developed BOOST - the BETT award-winning toolkit that safeguards your school community. It is a suite of powerful tools from our online safety experts at SWGfL to help you meet those challenges.

Knowing about incidents as they develop means fast and effective responses. But how does that information get to you? BOOST has two innovative reporting tools:

Whisper

Whisper is an app that allows anyone in your school community to report issues to you. They can choose to be anonymous or leave contact details. It offers a custom button, link or code for your school website or newsletter. There is even a unique dedicated mobile number. Anonymous reporting makes it easier to reach those who are reluctant or find reporting difficult.

Know your school community

Reputation Alerts

Reputation Alerts is a powerful tool that enables you to track any online references to your school. This could include:

  • Complaints
  • unfair comments
  • teacher abuse

The tool scans social media, blogs, websites and press to let you know when you are being mentioned. It even rates whether the mention is positive or negative and how influential it is. It will email you if it finds anything important or urgent. You have full control through your own dashboard and can make as many searches as you need.

Improve your safeguarding intelligence

Respond

Responses to online safety incidents should be rapid and effective. They must also meet statutory requirements. How can you be sure they do?

The BOOST toolkit includes the Incident Response Tool (IRT). This interactive document provides advice and support for managing online safety incidents and guides you through the necessary procedure and informs you at each stage. All the advice and recording forms you need, all in one place.

Ensure you meet your duty of care

Training

Statutory guidance* requires annual safeguarding training for all staff, that includes online safety training. Developing staff expertise should be up-to-date and relevant to ensure appropriate interventions. However, using external speakers to train staff can be expensive, time-consuming and infrequent.

The BOOST toolkit includes:

  • A full staff development programme in Online Safety
  • Presentation slides with scripts and resources for you to train your own staff
  • Short, focused videos on specific issues to build expertise for key staff
  • Exclusive live webinars each month with a SWGfL expert
  • Regular updates to content that keep you up to speed with the latest risks, issues and policies.

Boost+

For a little more money you can access the exclusive BOOST+ training resource. This offers the same BOOST quality and attention to detail, but also keeps a record of training, people and dates and reminds you when they need renewing.

Empower your staff

More information about BOOST

or email using the contact form for more details.

* Keeping Children Safe in Education 2016 DfE

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