Promote digital resilience

Your curriculum is the most important vehicle to convey the key messages and knowledge pupils need to know to keep themselves safe online. Therefore, it is essential that you give careful thought to how this knowledge is going to be built upon year on year.

All schools should, by law, have a curriculum that supports online safety. This intention requires you to review it against up-to-date guidance on how to keep pupils safe. Use these helpful support sources to put together your curriculum:

• Internet Matters helps parents keep their children safe online.
• Read the House of Commons report on the impact of social media and screen use on young people’s health.
• Check out the NSPCC guide to e-safety for schools.
• Look at the statutory safeguarding and curriculum requirements for keeping children safe online in education.

You could deliver training to help staff support children more effectively. Use this graphic to help put into context the impact of COVID-19 on children as a starting point for the training.

• Decide the best way to help pupils know more about the challenges and threats when using the internet and smart devices. Will it be through computing, PSHE, ‘dropdown days’, workshops or a combination of all? Whatever way, it should be carefully coordinated.
• Set out the knowledge pupils should be taught in each year and the best way to teach it by using Education for a Connected World – a framework designed to equip children and young people for digital life – to devise your plan.

Top tips

• Teach critical thinking skills by using other subjects to encourage pupils to be critical of what they are fed on their social media feed (history, PSHE, computing, citizenship).
• Invite groups to deliver workshops or performances to support online safety awareness and digital resilience.
• Ensure your curriculum is appropriate for the very youngest children to the oldest.

Further resources

• Access practical advice about internet safety advice for different ages.
• Read the government guidance on teaching online safety in schools (DfE).
• Look at the statutory guidance for keeping children safe in education (2021).
• Make sure you are up to date with the statutory guidance for relationships and sex education (RSE) and health education.

Parents can play a very big part in helping children become digitally resilient. There are now plenty of organisations available to help parents keep their children safe online. Schools can help parents to navigate the wealth of guidance by signposting helpful organisations and putting together some helpful hints and tips in a parental guide.

Ways you could put together the parental guide:

• Use the helpful guidance for parents provided by the NSPCC on online safety for children to compile an online safety booklet for parents.
• Use the school website to signpost parents and pupils for help and advice.
• Create some FAQs and use staff, including computing teachers, to suggest suitable responses.
• Create direct communication lines where parents can ask questions and/or report concerns.

Top tips

Develop partnerships with key organisations to support online safety and awareness-raising:

• Explore the membership options at National Online Safety.
• NSPCC
• SWGfL.

Further resources

• Use these tips and guides about online safety for children.
• Kidscape offers some useful advice about bullying awareness for parents and carers.

With the fast-moving developments in technology and its use by young people, it’s often very helpful to enlist support from the pupils themselves. Older pupils who have been through the school can offer advice to school leaders about the suitability and relevance of the current online safety curriculum. They can keep leaders up to date with the latest issues when using smart technologies or online behaviours as well as support younger pupils who may need extra guidance. As digital ambassadors, they can be an extra source of support, where peer advice might be more appealing.

Top tips

• Ask older pupils to write a letter of intent to become an ambassador or let potential student leaders hold a husting.
• Ambassadors can deliver assemblies on the latest issues on social media or gaming.
• Ambassadors can deliver workshops to parents to support their online safety knowledge.

Often schools have an online safety curriculum in place and there is plenty of advice available to help pupils keep safe but sometimes schools don’t check with pupils whether they have understood what has been taught. This is because this guidance is often given in a part of the school’s curriculum which is not normally assessed.

This intention asks schools to devise ways to evaluate how well pupils know how to keep safe. From this information, they can adapt and change their curriculum.

Suggested ways could include:

• Create a low-stakes quiz to test pupils’ knowledge based on the curriculum they’ve been taught each year.
• Choose a range of pupils representing the demographic make-up of the school and pose some scenarios they might encounter online to find out what they would do.

If you do this assessment systematically, your school will be able to strengthen its work to keep pupils digitally resilient.

Top tip

• Use the internet filtering system to identify potential problems with improper internet usage.

This intention provides an excellent opportunity to involve pupils in devising a policy. This would be especially suitable for older pupils, who would be able to provide child-friendly rules to support their peers. In this way, the code of practice is ‘owned’ by everyone.

The term ‘digital citizen’ needs to be well understood. A digital citizen is someone who is not only behaving safely online but also responsibly and respectfully. With the high rates of bullying and trolling, schools are in a great position to teach young people digital etiquette and the harm that could be caused when online behaviours are irresponsible.

Top tip

• Make the code of practice visually useful (pictures, images, signs). This will support pupils with SEND and younger pupils.

Further resources

• This guide offers practical advice about digital citizenship for early years and primary pupils and also secondary pupils.

This intention is about opening up lines of communication to give pupils many ways to not only report concerns but also discuss what they are doing online. By doing so, pupils can share their experiences and seek help and advice, thus becoming more resilient.

Suggested ways to implement this intention:

• Set up an anonymous reporting system in the school (this could be digital or physical).
• Hold monthly focus group discussions among older pupils in primary school and all year groups in secondary schools to discuss the impact of online activities. This could be gaming, social media or other internet activities, including dating or pornography exposure.
• Nominate digital ambassadors who can be the ‘eyes and ears’ of the school. These pupils could help leaders devise appropriate advice and guidance to support digital resilience.

It is important that these sessions are led by someone who pupils feel they can trust and can open up to. Sometimes this works well when it is conducted by someone who is not that well known to the pupils because pupils tend to speak more freely.