ARPart of the UK Safer Internet Centre’s work is to show schools and other educational establishments, how to establish ‘appropriate levels’ of filtering and monitoring. This work has been carried out since 2016 and each year gathers responses from some of the leading filtering providers.
In that time, schools have been taking a more active role in ensuring harmful material such as terrorist and child sexual abuse material is effectively blocked across school systems. The UK Safer Internet Centre is now ensuring that schools ensure that they ‘satisfy themselves that filtering and monitoring are correctly working across all their devices’ for the new school year, with specific reference to mobile devices such as iPads and other tablets which they may use of, as part of their teaching strategy.
Filtering for Mobile Devices
The UK Safer Internet Centre highlights that if your school owns mobile devices then it is essential to consider certain practices to ensure correct filtering is in place. Make sure you visit the original article to explore these practices in more detail. They include:
Audit all mobiles devices that are owned
Understanding and detailing the apps that are used across devices
Identifying responsibility within the school
Testing filtering and monitoring across devices
Identifying any vulnerable users
As an added practice, the UK Safer Internet Centre also recommends taking this opportunity to:
• Communicate reporting mechanisms that may be used in the school
• Ensurie that acceptable use policies are clear and understood
How to Test Filtering
SWGfL operate Test Filtering to support schools with understanding more about what filtering systems they have in place. If you want to test whether your school filtering system effectively blocks out harmful content such as terrorist material and child sexual abuse content then Test Filtering is a free solution that shows you what is in place. Try it out now.
