Welcome to our page dedicated to information, links and tips about Online Safety.

At Cotmanhay Infant and Nursery, the importance of Online Safety is reinforced throughout the year as well as being explicitly taught in PSHE and in ICT lessons (each week.)

Every February we celebrate SIDs (Safer Internet Day) with a range of activities and assemblies throughout the school.

• Old Macdonald had a Phone

Have you tried searching for your name on Google? What comes up? Was it what you expected?

Our aim as parents, carers and teachers is to keep our children safe. This is the same for the online world.

We all know that the current world is heavily technology based and this will only get bigger. We want our children to grow up with technology being second nature, however with this we also know how important it is for our children to know safe practises online as well as in everyday life.

At home, sometimes children can be given unsupervised access to the Internet. This, potentially, allows them to access all kinds of society (both good and bad) and bring them virtually into their homes. We would encourage you to talk to your children about what they are doing online, always encourage your child to be online in a shared area so you can work together.

It’s essential to be realistic - banning the internet or technology will not work and it often makes a child less likely to report a problem. Education around safe use is essential.

We would encourage parents to set up filtering on their home internet. To learn how to do this for the major providers of internet please click here. Setting up internet filtering at home

Do you or your child play online games?

Video games are everywhere and offer all manner of ways to entertain, educate and get creative. Although at times they can feel a little confusing, take the time to understand them and they can be a positive thing for families to enjoy together.

Setting up parental controls on your games console when you first buy it enables you to specify which age rating of games and films can be viewed on the hardware without a password.

These settings also control the online interactions players can make with each other and whether voice and pictures can be shared. It's important to understand these possible online interactions and discuss appropriate behaviour with your child before they use these features. On some consoles you can also specify how long it can be played in a day before it automatically pauses.

For more information on the different consoles please see the links below:

xbox           xbox360         playstation 4          Nintendo switch         ipad

Minecraft

Please click on the link below, it offers great advise to carers about how to keep your child safe on minecraft. There are lots of good tips and also supports you to know your creepers from your Nethers.

Snapchat

Snap chat is an app that allows instant pictures to be sent between devises. It erases itself after 10 seconds but these images are able to be screen shot. If your child is under 12 the advise is that children do not use these apps. With snapchat, it is very difficult for a parent to keep track of what their child is sending to others as it 'disappears' after 10 seconds. The advise is to download other apps that cannot be instant messaged. Look at this site for more advice. http://www.internetmatters.org/hub/guidance/snapchat-safety-a-how-to-guide-for-parents/

• For further advise please visit http://www.internetmatters.org/advice/online-gaming/

Remember your child will not always know who they are talking to online and other gamers are not always who they seem.

Cyberbullying

Cyberbulling is just as serious as real life bullying and should be taken extremely serious. The growing advance in technology means that bullying is no longer limited to the playground. It can occur at anytime and involve a whole number of people. It is not limited to social media and may be in many different forms. It is important that you closely monitor your child should you suspect cyberbullying and attempt to discuss it with your child without any judgement. Please refer any concerns you feel have happened in school time to your child's teacher immediately.

Talking to your child is paramount, reassure them that you are going to help them, our advise is not to take away mobile devises or ban use of computers but limit time on social media sites, encourage your child to talk about their concerns and always seek advice. Some helpful sites are family lives, childline, NSPCC or beatbullying.

Sexting

Sexting is the sending or receiving of any image, message or email that involves sexually explicit content. Sexting can be seen as harmless, but creating or sharing explicit images of a child is illegal, even if the person doing it is a child. Children do not call it sexting so you need to be aware what to look for. Around 1 in 7 young people have taken a semi-naked/naked picture of themselves. Over half went on to share the picture with someone else.

It is classed as breaking the law if anyone:

• takes an explicit photo or video of themselves or a friend
• shares an explicit image or video of a child, even if it’s shared between children of the same age
• possess, downloads or stores an explicit image or video of a child, even if the child gave their permission for it to be created. 

AI generated images

This is on the rise and it is important for parents and adults to be aware of what this is.

• Offenders (often from other countries) are de-clothing innocent images of students who have posted online, e.g. social media. These are then used for the purpose of blackmail, often with the threat of sharing with school friends/family. This is sextortion. 
• Students using innocent images of other students (e.g. posted on social media), de-clothing them using AI, then sharing with other students.

So what's the advice?

Firstly, the most important point of all is that any AI CSAM image/video is treated as real regardless of the circumstance. Forget the fact that it is AI-generated, you treat it as real media. Please report this, use the report remove button to get the image removed from the internet and then contact the police and the school. 

Safety in school

Our school has a Derbyshire provided filtering system in place. We use a scheme of work that embeds safeguarding of children online and is taught throughout the whole year through each strand in the curriculum. For further information on our scheme of work please ask a member of staff or the computing lead Mrs Gillott.

All children are closely monitored using the computers and all children have signed and agreed to class rules linked to the computers. (Acceptable use policy) All the children in our school know that if they see something that they do not like, they switch the screen off and immediately tell an adult. All apps/websites are demonstrated to the children before use and then children are supervised using the program independently. The use of mobile technologies are always adult supervised and no child is able to bring any mobile devises of their own onto the school property. (See our mobile phones policy.) Any photos taken of a child in school are saved only on the secure network and are deleted from any mobile technologies. All staff working in school have signed the acceptable use policy and all parents have signed an agreement about the use of computers and images in school.

Please ask in school to see any of our policies around the safeguarding of your child in our school.

Search Engines for children

Please note that no search engine is ever 100% safe but below provides links to some “safer” search engines:

Research searching

• nICE
• CBBC
• Kids Yahoo
• kiddle
• swiggle

In school, children learn about Online safety through a scheme which integrates keeping safe into every single lesson. Alongside this we have assemblies and workshops. 

Our children know to report any inappropriate content, contact or conduct they encounter online and follow the guidelines that can be found near the computers in all classrooms. Children talk about these guidelines everyday and before any computing teaching takes place.

The website below provides clear guidance for children about Online Safety, so please click on the image and have a play.

As a school we use the 360 self review tool for online safety. For further information please ask a member of staff or email at info@cotmanhay-inf.derbyshire.sch.uk 

Remember if you or anyone you know has any concerns or worries about anything you have seen online please always tell someone or report it to ceop. 

It is important that your child knows where to get help too. Childline can support young people through lots of online safety issues and we advise our pupils of this number on our child friendly safeguarding policy.

 

• Video link to online safety Watch this fabulous video all about how to keep safe online.

 

The button report harmful content, has been developed to offer anyone living in the UK a simple and convenient mechanism for gaining access to reporting routes for commonly used social networking sites, gaming platforms, apps and streaming services alongside trusted online safety advice, help and support. It also provides access to an online mechanism for reporting online harm to the RHC service for those over the age of 13 where an initial report has been made to industry but no action has been taken. RHC will review content in line with a sites' community standards and act in a mediatory capacity where content goes against these.

Children under 13 years of age are encouraged to tell an adult that they trust about what has happened and to ask for their help in reporting this.